What I cooked last night.

I was scared rigid. My life’s inexorable linear projection was punctuated by moments of sheer terror, and no-one could say where this predilection to be terrified came from. In the middle of nights that never ended I drew the bedclothes up so tightly I wished I could have zipped them around my face, as I’d done once with my older brother’s tartan-lined sleeping bag at a scout camp at Rowallan in the spring of 1968; an irony given that in the company of dozens of sleeping others I felt no fear at all. By day, while a scout leader chased a fear-stricken koala up a tree to the vapid amusement of his minions (an event that revealed to me the vacuous corruption of authority), from a crackling camp radio speaker crept  This Guy’s in Love With You, Witchita Lineman, The Fool on the Hill, Macarthur Park; and my mind climbed into and around every piano intro, vocal inflection and orchestral upsweep, as if each note were an architectural manifestation, a building block, of some other univer...

It’s that time of year. Tomatoes on the vine, basil in the ground, heat in the air. The tomatoes are mainly the cherry type, and they will be prolific. As the vines themselves are over six feet tall, I had to go to that ghastly hardware place and buy stakes. Is there an alternative? Please advise. And I don’t mean ripping thin lengths of timber from a neighbour’s fence.  The stakes are not really tall enough: they lost two of their seven feet on being hit into the ground; even so they are slightly unstable under the weight of a six-foot vine and will go over completely if we have a strong-enough wind. Basil is easy but transient. It is impervious to sun even at forty Celsius, but the snails will eat it. Also, pick it before it goes to seed which this year was quickly.  Ok. Tomatoes and basil organised: now to eat.  Easiest of all, slice tomatoes over good bread brushed with olive oil, crumble some goats’ cheese over (Meredith Dairy, or Coles has its own version - which pr...

The two older teenagers and their mother flew back from the land of her parents’ birth, and late on a warm humid night I met them at the airport, and heard stories of Scotland on the way home. Being mid-winter in the northern hemisphere it had been cold and it had snowed and it was out of tourist season; therefore it had been a good time to travel. The following night we had dinner in a small Vietnamese restaurant and I heard the extended adventures illustrated occasionally by pictures on a phone. Thanks to its immediacy the cell phone has ingeniously obviated that once-common social occasion, the slide night. Overseas travellers once took rolls of film and had them developed as ‘slides’ - transparencies - to be projected against a large bare wall. This function (as well as for projections of Super 8 films) was catered for by architects who penned the cathedral-ceilinged or low-slung modern houses of the cosmopolitan 1950s. The slide night, a cultural shipwreck ironically washed up on ...

New buildings are curated now, with museum-like interpretations of their anthropomorphic value and historical influences: ‘Coburg Station presents as a civic gesture drawing abstract references to the formal language of classical architecture.’ Given the formal language of the station, the sign in front kind of lets the side down.

The magpie stood beneath a photinia shrub in the front garden, beak ajar and slightly upturned, as if it were singing in a film documentary from the silent era; but with no sound it was just a hot bird cooling itself in the shade. I turned on the sprinkler; they like to bathe in the falling drops of water. It was 42 degrees. 107 always sounded better, but you have to be of a certain age to remember Fahrenheit. Another magpie appeared, dropping down from a power line, or someone’s roof. It was probably a sibling or a some other relative of the first. The pair were most likely descendants of a deformed bird I once knew and  wrote about . * Earlier in the afternoon I had taken the youngest teenager to her first shift at a takeaway restaurant. Before picking her up later I had sat at an open-air table outside a cafe in the mall with a drink and an Alberto Moravia novel. It’s only a kilometre and a half from home but in this heat ...  * Two Women is set in the coastal mountains so...