What I Cooked Last Night

A newspaper item (The Australian, it should know better) reported last week that while the perpetrator of a crime had been captured, the gun he had used to threaten his victim was still ‘at large’. * Mistakes - typos, literals  - happen. I usually ignore them. Everyone makes them. Including me. But there is a change. We are seeing more of the errors that used to be called schoolboy howlers not only submitted but sailing all the way past the increasingly illiterate eyes of the sub-editor and proofreader (if there is one) and into print and digital publication.  So let’s enjoy the chase as we hunt down errors of the type usually described as (the world’s most currently overused word): ‘egregious’.

Dead quiet on a heat-heavy afternoon, around two o'clock, except for the almost imperceptible shush of movement from the trees; an almost-audible shimmer of movement, mirrors of light, from the full-leafed shrubs; and some faraway grind of a bus on a hill. Far, far away. That was a week, three days, two days, before Christmas.  I had finished school days before. The world was mine; the world being the garden, the street, the hill to the river, in another direction, another hill to a creek that wound, anyway, down to the same river. Another direction, around two corners to a small strip of shops that seemed asleep under the sun's oppression: side street; milk bar; haberdashery; newsagent; chemist; butcher; greengrocer; bakery; Four Square grocery; fish shop; another side street. The haberdashery was also an agent for the bank, a curiosity I found perfectly normal; the grey-haired cardiganed middle-aged woman who ran it seemed perfectly suited to taking one's money, putting i...

Nine hundred kilometres south, early in the evening, after a  warm, overcast Sunday I had spent at Lakeside, I was on a train heading to my home in the northern suburbs. During the afternoon, in between sporting events, I had taken a book to the sun-drenched lawn high up behind the bleachers (plastic bucket seats these days, powerfully sprung so that they won’t even support your bag of running gear without flipping up and flushing it onto the dusty concrete below). The novel was Philip Roth’s Nemesis (Jonathan Cape, 2010). The grandfather, Sam Cantor, had come alone to America in the 1880s as an immigrant child from a Jewish village in Polish Galicia. His fearlessness had been learned in the Newark streets, where his nose had been broken more than once in fights with anti-Semitic gangs. The violent aggression against Jews that was commonplace in the city during his slum boyhood did much to form his view of life and his grandson’s view in turn. He encouraged the grandson to stand up...

In a 2017 interview Tom Stoppard recalled the crowded solitude of his writer’s block: ‘  … there are so many things that ought to be written about, and could be written about, that the contents of my head appear to be mostly white noise, a buzz of all the possible things’.  While not making any comparisons with the playwright, I can empathise. Stoppard : ‘I’m a bit oversensitive about the ideal conditions that I desire or require for doing proper work. They tend towards the extreme, isolation. It’s as though I need to be the only person in the house before I can completely let go of everything around me’. * (Quotes from obituary published in The Times last week and reprinted in The Australian on 5 December.)

‘That’s nice! What is it?’ Or: ‘What’s for dinner?’ She of an earlier generation might - and did - dismiss the impertinent questions with a kindly but sarcastic culinary neologism. But the next generation - the abundant post-war offspring (whose parents feared, after two wars in a few decades, will we lose these as well ?) grew up into a cossetted mid-century middle class that wanted answers. Newly cosmopolitan, and hearing the siren call of airbound silver jets roaring across airport boundaries and up and down the streets and avenues of the suburbs and banlieues, they crossed becalmed oceans, freshly ridded of U-boats, to hunt for foreign dishes, just as their safariing grandparents had hunted game. The names of such captured dishes would be practised in front of pre-dinner party mirrors and tripped off tongues with the syllabic facility and pronunciation of a first language - bouillabaisse; onigiri; cacciatore  - and the resulting culinary exotica would be displayed - and announc...

It rained all Saturday. Not unusual for the third month of spring, but rain that goes on for days is a Melbourne fixture; a festival of sopping misery and cancelled sporting fixtures in a Mediterranean climate that is supposed to follow its seasonal script. I’m exaggerating, of course. It’s not Innisfail. But it’s not tropical either. In childhood I hated enforced confinement. I was an outdoors child. Not the hunting and fishing type, I just did not want to be in the house for days on end. You can’t go outside. It’s raining. I can see that. It’s been raining since Wednesday. Don’t be sarcastic.  That’s not sarcasm, I replied, it’s observation. I went from room to room looking for another climate. I found several in books. Then back to damp reality, in the days before I learned a harsh forbidding beauty could be found in the ever-changing skies thanks to the winds from the oceans at the bottom of the world. Through the louvred panes of a window overlooking the back garden I stared ...

I spent that year removing seventy years’ worth of flashbacks from the house in gaffer-taped or open-top boxes, and black plastic garbage bags half-filled like under-inflated giant balloons. The flashbacks - old teapots, Leon Uris novels, a pressure cooker, an A-line dress in yellow and orange polished cotton that still had some 1950s sunshine stuck to it, a Gem razor, a wooden-handled chisel - trooped gaily to the car and got in like children going off to a summer camp; rattling and shushing and flipping and clunking on their way to the opportunity shop. Then it was done. Three fourths of a century of junk, each piece with its own little micro-climate of memories, gone. Freed from driving endless boxes of ornaments to second-hand shops (the provenance of much of the junk, it should be pointed out; my mother was an incorrigible collector and hoarder), I relished the freedom of being on foot, diverting the route of my occasional runs to pass the house while it was unoccupied but still u...

The health food store near the Fawkner Street corner closed for ever one afternoon in the early 1970s. The health food boom had begun. Begun? With a closure? The paradox was simple. Whereas the original health food store sold bulk grains, dried fruits, nuts, flours, unwrapped loaves and cheeses to first-generation eastern European migrants, the health 'boom' left staples in its wake. Amid the new-found mobility of the 1950s, post-war children tired of their migrant parents' villagey habits, and turned to supermarkets and shopping malls, often walking greater distances across endless acres of car parks than had their forebears to the corner shop. It was yet another age of progress, not to mention irony. Snake-oiled with health claims verging on promised immortality - e at yogurt and live to 108 like the Bulgarians -  manufactured food products made anything not so produced look like the quaint output of some gnarled grandma in a bucolic stone cottage surrounded in the unpav...

Beethoven, back on Earth in the twenty-first century and reincarnated as his hearing self, was walking along a street when suddenly from the speakers of some passing open car came sufficient notes of  Cantata on the D eath of Emperor Joseph II  that he recognised his own unpublished composition. He was horrified. A sudden terrible thought struck him, already confused by the motorised monsters (albeit that a late-eighteenth century mind could reasonably deduce that self-powered vehicles, already more than a mechanical chimera, may have advanced). The more dreadful thought that struck Beethoven was that perhaps the music of the spheres had always been there for the taking; that time might even run backwards, and that he had merely been a medium, a conduit, for plucking a series of notes from this hellish place and time and transtemporising them to a reverse future residing in the urbanely familiar eighteenth century. He had defeated time, apparently. But the cacophony, notwithst...

The dressing for the gnocchi was merely a leek, cut very finely from the middle, where it is not white nor dark green, but a colour most accurately described as chartreuse.  This brilliant yellow-green tone is rendered almost fluorescent when cooked very gently. I sautéed the little flecks of leek, curved like minute sections of E-type Jaguar front wing, or small arcs of the lime-green patent leather knee boot of a 1960s Carnaby Street model, in a generous quantity of olive oil, keeping a careful eye on it so that it wouldn’t brown but merely absorb the oil via a kind of reverse oleaginous osmosis.   It had been a busy day. The weather hadn't turned. One or two warm days; the rest had been wet, windy, cold. Second month of spring. I had found a book in that shop where people throw out their unwanted clothes, old pictures off their walls, kitchen pots and pans and utensils beaten and greyed, and broken crockery sets (broken as in incomplete if not actually chipped) left over fr...

Coffee tastes better outside, I thought. Could be the fresh air. I was sitting in the pale sun of late winter with a coffee, a book, and that eternal latter-day yoke, a phone. The wind was skittering the chairs and tables, like dried leaves, and lifting the fine-beaded foam on my coffee, the colour of a palomino’s mane. The mall was a rectangle of concrete broken up by large whorls of broken bluestone, like cross-sections of giant fossil snails, or had that been somewhere else? Cafes, a smoke shop, and a post office looked out from under their eaves on six or eight tall thin eucalypts that gave too little shade in summer and too much against the scant sun in winter.  In the past the strip was greengrocers and barber shops and continental butchers and an Italian cobbler and salami shops crowded with young mothers; and suddenly appearing among the ant-like busyness to talk and enquire solicitously after their husbands was the priest who strode black-cassocked five hundred yards ...

My father, his life upturned and then flipped upright again like a fibreglass canoe, rode the passing years silently, serially taking on hobbies. Freelance photographer, gem collector and polisher, horse race predictor, painter in oils, student of quasi-religious phenomena, candle-maker.  Some of his photographs still exist in an old corrugated box that I found beneath a shelf when I was clearing the outhouse he built as a darkroom in the forgiving late 1960s. A grimacing baseball hitter at Ross Straw Field, mid-strike bat caught forever in the horizontal, stands in black and white infinity, his body curling with the chemical-spattered photographic proof paper. A rider, red-coated and tall in the saddle, wafts a grey across a fence, towards camera, at an Ascot Vale equestrian event, the horse’s eyelashed protuberant eyes frozen in time as if from some medieval painting. A familiar sedan is parked outside a store, ‘pies, sandwiches, cigarettes,’ on a main road steeply shadowed by br...

They extended the house because of more children, and kicked me into the new room. It faced east and was built over the front lawn. I imagined the grass turning brown and dying slowly beneath me while I slept.  On those incendiary summer mornings, the sun, one thing in life you could depend on, would hoist itself above the cream brick house across the street, and smash like a ripe peach into my dark green blind, its fragments making pin-holes of light in the canvas, and throwing blurred circles like hot dancing snowflakes onto the opposite wall.  I would jerk the blind up, drowning the pin-hole light show in a solid cube of dazzling white. Across the road, the cream brick house always looked like a square crouching animal, silhouetted until midday beneath its eave ears.  The new bedroom absorbed the original front door. Now I used it as an exit, which I used at night with unscathed dignity - instead of clambering, novel-style, out of the sash window - on my way to an...

Everything is -'friendly'. Eco-friendly. User-friendly. Reader-friendly.  Objects, concepts. What happened to human-friendly?  Vegan-friendly , trumpeted the package, which contained wheat germ. Long-term readers might or might not recall that I have had something of an ongoing  semi- obsession with the over-earnest, ungrammatical, or sheer moronic label claims that plague manufactured food products. Clearly, either the general population - the consumers of these goods and their verbal assaults - or the marketing industry - their illiterate authors - has become stupider. Or both. Probably both. Irony aside, what madness is it that the consumer needs a printed assurance that a bag containing 100% ex-vegetation has no animal content? Or that its processing has not knowingly been associated with members of the animal kingdom throughout its journey from grassland to four-colour-process-overprinted crude oil-based plastic packaging? Which, in any case, means what? A process w...

The city was designed radially, its outbranching main roads like spokes in a wheel. I grew up on a north-west spoke that impaled the blunt mercantility of Moonee Ponds and Essendon on its way to Keilor's thistle-infested basalt plains, where the wind cried nothing. Not that it was a cultural wasteland. At school as a seven-year-old I used to gaze at the face of a smiling whale as it surfaced in the Southern Ocean on a giant world map pinned to the wall behind Miss Burns’ desk while she played Tchaikovsky on the mono record player I had carried, boxed in its case, laboriously from home. The basic timber church across the schoolyard, a half-acre of knee-ripping gravel embedded in asphalt, still practised Benediction, that most aesthetically and psychically rewarding of Christian rituals. Later, having bought a car, I discovered a new spoke, a new vector in the broken circle of Melbourne. This new trajectory, pointing north-east, pierced suburbs aroused by the semi-rural Heidelberg sc...

The uncle was not a real uncle but a second cousin, adopted by my grandfather as a seven-year-old after his mother had died in his infancy. His father, post-war, had been too busy or couldn’t be bothered; or was drunk, or syphilitic, or both, or just disappeared. Now it was the early 1960s, and the uncle was a proto-hippy with a dark clipped beard and Buddy Holly glasses. He could have been a folk singer of protest songs, but instead took a successful career in finance and married a tall dark-haired beauty with eyes like deep pools and the kind of freckles that spoke of past summers on endless beaches.  For all that unlocked vault of luck, or Calvinist pre-destination if you prefer, the uncle was not pretentious. He drove a blue Volkswagen, and he drove it like a Porsche. On Sunday afternoons he threw it around hairpin bends on the road up to Mt. Dandenong, at the top of which we fell out, dizzied, laughing, cramped. We gazed at the map-like monochrome spread of Melbourne way down ...

The underside of a car loomed above me; it looked, up there on the hoist, like a stuck beetle seen from underneath. I made out a Volkswagen, its headlights half-shut eyes in the garage gloom. The office window, variegated with Castrol, Visco-Static, Penrite, and Marlboro stickers, opened on the apron where the sun was dropping bombs of heat. It made silhouettes of bowsers and humans and rendered the houses on the other side of the road colourless. Beyond the houses a faint line, an eye-shadow, of low distant hills held its midday trance. The garage attendant became a tall thin stooped cut-out of some dark animal pointing a gun at my unseen father, a sitting duck in the driver’s seat of his black cardboard car. Heat-driven waves of fuel vapour rose, refracting the Shell sign behind the attendant as he dutifully tap-tapped the nozzle on the car’s tank outlet. Every last drop. I slunk out into the swimming atmosphere and climbed onto the hot vinyl. We slid smoothly out of the Shell se...

Three right angles took me to school, thanks to the1920s cartographers who, in their grid obsession, turned geography into geometry. I started school early; four. From the front gate, two hundred gently rising yards of cream and red brick houses crouched behind shrub and lawn, neat, ordered, tidy. Left turn. Fifty yards. Still a gentle ascent, fewer houses; bigger, quieter, somehow richer. Must have been the east-west orientation rather than my north-south.  Right turn. Main road. Careful: Frank in my grade two class, who lived on this road, was knocked down here once. Never the same. Ran across desks, molten anger. (Alcoholic father didn’t help; much older lawyer brother the same. Mother was an angel; dark eyes uplifted in some kind of accepting grace behind which lurked an infinite sadness. Also, two beautiful flaxen-haired sisters like muted divas.) Twenty yards. Left turn. Thirty yards. School gate.  Three right angles: a square peeled open into a zig-zag line on a map, as...

You think you saw something last week in the supermarket, and you look for it, and it isn't there. Must be out of stock, you think. Then you go home and google it, and find out it was discontinued in 2008. Nuts. But I saw it not a year or so ago. Maybe two. No, you didn’t. You haven’t seen it for seventeen years; maybe fifteen if you kept a pack in your cupboard going stale for a year or two. In that fifteen years other things happened. Children were born and grew. You bought some cars. Some relatives died. Others didn’t. The house leaked for two years until you got it fixed. The house across the road sold, thank God, the owner’s subwoofer had sent earthquake rumbles under the entire street. The parish priest died.  Out-of-mind things come back as if they were there a minute ago, popping out of some elusive brain cul-de-sac, like a handkerchief in the pocket of an old coat you haven’t worn since last winter. Pro-Vita Weat-Harts: white pack, single ear of wheat graphic in ochre sil...

Of course, 3RRR and 3PBS announcers played Black Sabbath favourites all weekend; I heard ‘Changes’ oftener in the past week than I had in the last half century. Monday morning program Deeep (sic) Space concluded with the little-known Black Sabbath track 'She's Gone' (google the title and you’ll be in Hall & Oates 1970s heaven, or a 1990s stadium rock echo-chamber) from their 1976 album  Technical Ecstasy , a song that throws up a line in which perfect iambic pentameter, give or take a syllable, alchemises mere words into lyrics of otherwise  ineffable sadness and beauty: The silent emptiness of one-sided love

One day when I was a kid, I ran down a steep dune at Wilson’s Promontory that got steeper, and gravity inverted me, slamming my head through 135 degrees to hard sand. I remembered nothing until I floated home in my father's car late in the afternoon, gazing out at anamorphic scenery through the distorting glass of its 1960s curved windscreen; a psychedelic world of an unknown colour that had the taste and smell of sunshine filtered through dry desert sand. Concussion. Years later. I woke out of anaesthesia in the delirium of some drug, the one - or one of the ones - that makes you talk to anyone in your state of ecstasy, before the pain sets in and has to be worked at. A few months earlier, breathing had not returned to normal and, one x-ray later, I had found myself on the fourth floor, south, of a cream-brick hospital in Parkville. The nose had set in its broken position. No-one had noticed after the accident, in which my face had cannoned into the back of the front seat; but why...

I can’t - couldn’t then - criticise  Jaws,  the movie: I never saw it. (Although I doubted a shark could out-fright the feral truck in Spielberg’s first film, Duel . Anyone in the water would disagree, of course.) But I did read Jaws , the novel, during those strange empty months of winter 1975. I finished it one July afternoon sitting in Centrepoint, a lurid green downstairs bar off Bourke Street. I was waiting for a girlfriend, my fellow back-seat passenger who had escaped uninjured in a car accident a couple of months earlier. She worked in an office building a block away, and I had been in the habit of dropping into Centrepoint before meeting her after work.  The bar, being downstairs and a shade of green that glowed under artificial light, exuded a weirdly submarine atmosphere. I felt I was swimming through a sea of lime-green nylon carpet, laminex tables and vinyl chairs to get a drink, but maybe that was the book talking. Overhead, a circular drop ceiling simulated...

The first film of that year, 1975, was screened on a sultry afternoon in February in the old Radio Theatre, a 1940s relic in RMIT’s Bowen Lane. The film was Sydney Pollack's 1969 psychological drama  They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  In that same month, on the other side of the world,  Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville  and Pollack’s  Three Days of the Condor  were being shot or were in post-production. As was  Jaws . Film students yet to be born would in some future or extant cinema critique those productions. The theatre door, heavy as that of a bank safe, had closed with a heavy wheeze when I entered out of the blinding sun and, feeling my way, found a seat I could barely see. In the dim luminescence of the uncurtained screen, a film lecturer called Doug who, apparently relishing the prospect of sharing his cinematic favourites with a new intake of students, was enthusiastically introducing the film before signalling the projectionist - “Roll it, Sid...

The race to the solstice had been easily won; the weeks had flown and been flung aside, bits of history never to happen again.  But then the hard part. The solstice was a chimera; the promise of daylight remaining a few minutes longer masked the prospect of a long cold wet miserable July and August. Inhabitants of other climes might jeer, and point to their winters of ten below, or their blinding snowstorms. But snow is romantic; a Melbourne winter is a bone-chilling wind-blown marathon, without the northern hemisphere’s Christmas - with its logfire-and-sleigh bells imagery - in the middle. (We get to endure that hokey European nonsense when it’s forty in the shade: Celsius.) A fellow runner - a Canadian - once admitted to me one bleak winter night that the chill wind that whipped frozen Antarctic air and dropped its cut-throat icicles onto Olympic Park, the Botanical Gardens and their surrounding pathways on which we were running, Lycra-tighted and gloved, was colder, more glacial...

Walls fall; presidents and popes are shot (if not fatally, like musicians); rockets bearing civilians drop out of the sky; clothes grow pads; music becomes a visual medium (on hearing a tune a listener, confusing senses, exclaims, ‘I remember that video!’ ); Roth/Updike/Bellow carry on jousting*. Meanwhile, you had to eat. Not everything in the 1980s was of the 1980s, such as savoury mince, an example of the kind of mundane dish that became a default meal keeping the beef grinders in business like ‘spaghetti bolognese’ does today, its reddish-beige lava bubbling over cheddar-coloured pasta mountainsides in the bowl-volcanoes of a million family tables. ‘Bolognese again?’ Savoury? That redundant word is one of the cooking clichés that never disappears. What else is minced beef except savoury? What does it even mean? The word is scattered like confetti through the recipe supplements (lift-outs, the publishers called them) stapled into those mid-century women’s magazines that sold in the...

The Pink Pussycat - as cryptic a name as I could think of to drop at the next student party - was not the only source of income, little as it was, including tips. Melbourne Airport was arguably an even better conversation starter ( what, you fly planes? - people always think the obvious) but the work here was even more mundane than pouring a ‘taste’ (a charade that even then was embarrassingly outdated) of Yalumba Carte d’Or riesling or McWilliams Shiraz Cabernet into the glass of the male half of a dining couple so that, after making a method acting impression of a furrow-browed, purse-lipped judge at Mundus Vini, he would decide whether they would drink it or not. Indeed, the airport job - money is obviously tight in this anonymous early 1980s Carltonian mise en scène - involved little more than bussing Budget rental cars from their terminal drop-off point to a depot back in the endless sun-parched acres of tarmac in the backblocks of Tullamarine, where I cleared their overflowing ...

The pub - hotel - mentioned in the previous post was, of course, Poynton’s Carlton Club, on the corner of Grattan and Cardigan, opposite the Royal Women's Hospital. The Carlton Club was three short blocks from the small terrace house, whitewashed brick in the fashion of the Greeks (the owner was Con, a barman at the Continental Hotel in Lonsdale Street, to whom I paid the rent), in which we lived for five Arcadian years (an Arcadia chequered by the stop-start linear domesticities of child-raising; the eternal nightmare-producing (even now) failure to complete a degree; and the death,  late one night , of an older sibling, announced at the door by a couple of dark blue uniforms whose lines and colouration and stance and timing told me all I needed to know.  Nine minutes walk, slightly downhill; across Elgin, Faraday, and Grattan. The hotel’s Cardigan Street side had a separate door with a 1950s backlit and illustrated sign over it: Pink Pussy Cat Bistro , the cartooni...

I had a call from the auctioneer just as I was turning right for home into Sydney Road, on a pale sunny late Friday morning. I had been down to Carlton where the cafe I frequent permits writers to spend an hour or more over one coffee exuding words. Or not. He thanked me for the gift of wine and the signed copy of the book about the Moonee Ponds business whose story I had written a couple of years ago.  I had delivered the gift of wine and book to the Mt Alexander Rd agency a few days earlier. The book part of the gift was not an ego trip; the agency had pitched itself as an expert in the district, so I thought it might fill in a few colour-by-number spots in the patchwork of local history. The auctioneer told me he had already dipped into it and had recognised several names, locations, and events. The wine accompanying the book was a Henschke, a label I could not afford now; the owner of the hotel at which I worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s had always opened a bottle (well...

The day of the house auction, a couple of weeks ago, had been significant: the final day of autumn, the end of our 72-year family ownership of a west-facing, sunset-drenched oblong on the edge of the great city of the south, and the last day of warm weather. The following morning had dawned ominously cold to a ferocious blast from Antarctica. (‘Ominously’? It could have been any adverb - ‘oddly’, ‘ironically’, ‘appropriately’, ‘strangely’ - as long as it signified meaning in the context of sheer randomness. We fear the anarchy of existence, so we invent fate, investing the electrons and quarks and bosons with the ability to talk: untold billions of particles as seers and prophets, inhabiting infinity, unable to shut up.)  I think while I cook. It’s purposeless, but fun. It makes time go by: the ‘don’t watch the kettle boil’ theory. Thinking helps pasta cook faster when the sauce is already done. If I don’t think, I will keep checking it, or pulling the griller out or opening the ov...

 R.I.P. Brian Wilson.

The road out of Melbourne rose to Ballarat through smooth green saddle-back hills like giant rearing horses embedded in the landscape. Shafts of sun pierced the clouds, setting the hills off in an eerie luminosity.  We turned off halfway to Ballarat, heading for the cross-country running race. The course was in a vineyard which sat south of the freeway on a flank - several flanks - of the rising hills. Vineyard is misleading; it was of several hundred acres. The turnoff twisted left and hairpin-bent for a kilometre, and then we turned right - ‘cross-country race’ read the sign - into a small valley with vines stretching up and away into the distance. Tents had been pitched and a generator-powered inflatable arch - the finish line - had been set up and roped off. Small triangular orange flags on metal spikes marking the course curved away and disappeared tinily over a hill. Bang. They still start these things with a gun. In the colours I had worn in a race at Ballam Park nineteen ye...

We sat down at 10 o’clock - hipster breakfast time - in a 1980s cafe (you can tell by the aged clientele) in the shopping strip that runs east-west a few hundred metres from the house; the house that will, in two hours plus auctioneer spiel time, fall out of the family’s ownership for the first time in 74 years, signalled by the anti-climactic slap, like an egg cracking, of a rolled-up contract into the auctioneer’s left hand. Or his right, if he is left-handed. The shopping strip is a drawcard because it has cafes which have ascended the real estate pecking order of residential desirability to rank narrowly below ‘schools’; in some cases above. Our cafe, cornily named Strudels despite bearing no apparent affinity with Northern European cuisine, culture, staff or décor - indeed, it is run as so many of these places are by an industrious ex-subcontinental family - stands where once an aircraft engine maintenance plant dominated the block, its massive patients - Rolls-Royce Darts from Vi...

She’s been gone what, seven, eight months? It seems only weeks since the disembodied voice of the nurse came through the loudspeaker in the car as I crossed a darkening ridge between Daylesford and Hepburn Springs in early spring last year. ‘She’s not here, again,’ she had announced, tired. I could only repeat that my 96-year-old mother’s normal pattern - did I say normal? - was to trundle her walker to Keilor Road, day or night, the clock can say what it likes, and then return. She always had. However, if absent at medication time, the attending nurse was obliged to find her or put in a missing report. That night had been in the middle of my three-day intermission in the long-running tragi-comedy of my mother’s last act, which had stretched out longer than I could have imagined into a kind of medieval tapestry, its frayed threads portraying faded memories; pale horses with flaring nostrils rearing at nothing; messenger angels posing as infants past; small figures with indecipherable ...

Everyone seems to agree that everything you can eat tastes better in pastry.  Obvious hyperbolic exaggeration? Or was it a television commercial I once wrote for a brand of pastry in the late 1980s? I can’t remember. Jump-cuts of a kind of dysfunctional, in a quirky way, not an angry way, family making pastries: pastry pies, pastry hot dogs, turnovers, tarts, sweet pastries with raspberry jam and custard and dried fruits; and on it went, a real weekend afternoon cook-up, flour everywhere, and an end-super over the vision reading: everything tastes better in pastry ; then a quick cut to a three-year old on the floor who has found a piece of dropped pastry and is wrapping it around a small doll and all you can see sticking out of the pastry is its hair and its winky eyes; and the super dissolves to the words: almost everything , and then the brand logo. Later, we had to re-edit the end of the commercial to add a still of the family eating their pastries around the table wit...

A hot Friday morning, oddly quiet. On ANZAC Day, everything is closed and nothing happens except a football game at three in the afternoon. Everything before that is forbidden. Odd also, given the previous Friday, Good Friday, had been chaos on the roads, a day to race around and prepare for Easter, go camping, buy chocolate rabbits to hide for the kids, whatever. ANZAC Day, no. State-sponsored faux romanticism is the new religion; the papers, what’s left of them, are full of decrepit hundred-year-olds wearing rotting ribbons and old medals, having lived five times as long as the boys of eighteen and nineteen who threw their bullet-ridden bodies, full of hope and the seed of alpha-children, into French mud, all in the cause of the King.  Nothing to do. So I went on a walk, across a valley and three suburbs.  And back again. I set off under an intense mid-morning sun, passing houses with half-drawn blinds like sleepy eyes. Through the Vale, past the football ground and diagonal...

In the beginning this weblog was a place to store improvised recipes that had (kind of) worked - given that I am no chef. Before that I scribbled ideas on scraps of paper and put them between the pages of cookbooks - a random collection that included one with blank pages framed in stock illustrations, in which you transcribed your own recipes. I had dutifully penned in a couple between the parted lettuce leaves and artful scatterings of peas and shards of cheese; and then shelved it. I could not throw the book out because it had been a gift from someone. Who? I forget. Sentimentality makes you a slave, even to the unknown. Conscripting leftovers was an early gastronomic tic that persists today, given that in this house of coming-and-going teenagers, eating might occur at all hours or sometimes none. On a good day they’ll eat like six tigers; a casserole of stuffed capsicum, the rest of the ham, a cold roast chicken, last night’s pasta carbonara.  Corned beef hash, gourmet-style. It...

The real estate agent suggested a gardener. I declined. A gardener tends gardens. This is a jungle. So I would take a hedge trimmer and a ‘lawn’ mower and make little pools of sunshine where before there was only scrub, overhang, bramble, thicket. (That makes it sound like it hadn’t been touched for years: far from it. I had been hacking away at its turbo-powered growth for more than ten years . It’s a legacy of the dear departed’s vision for a completely untrammelled garden, Alexander Pope’s ‘unadorned nature’ on steroids.) So no gardener. Nor a stylist. The house will most likely be demolished. A stylist would just be demoralised, like a make-up artist asked to work on a condemned man. So I cut and slash and the years fall to the ground along with the branches and twigs and leaves. ‘One-owner house,’ will project the auctioneer, all grey suit and sharp hair and rolled-up auction blurb to slap on his other hand at ‘sold’. I wrote copy for an estate agent at the turn of the century; k...