What I cooked last night.

The Mark II Jaguar, silver, red leather, flew across Moreland Road and straight through a red light. It was seven in the morning. I was driving blind into the rising sun. I saw nothing else, let alone a couple of peripheral red orbs. I should have been more attentive. I should have driven slower. I should have been dead. Plenty of crooks in swinging 1960s London used Mark II Jaguars as getaway cars, and crashed them, and ended up maimed or worse. I kept going. The maternity hospital was a faint brutalist silhouette in the distance. Last day of January, 1977. I’d stayed awake the previous night with a Haig on ice and the late movie - Vertigo - on TV, waiting for the phone to ring. It was good. I had stared at the screen without wanting to throw a brick through it, and even the ads were kind of acceptable, corny but with none of the sanctimonious rationalisations that sell everything from cans of tuna to cars these days. The television itself was a chunky four-legged mid-seventies model...

We drove down from the artists’ colony and headed south west through the foothill-underpinned and heavily treed suburbs of Montmorency (which always reminded me, when I drove through it, of the fox-terrier in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat ), Macleod and Rosanna; and then the road flattened out and we were back in the inner-city grid heading for a warehouse in the back street of a used-to-be working class suburb, where once men hacked and sawed and planed and amber-shellacked, and made things of lasting beauty and utility that would never be placed on the street for the hard rubbish collection. And there it was: an old sawtooth-topped factory of red brick. It was such a caricature you could almost see it breathing in and out, cartoonishly, along with the let’s work soundtrack, and workers inside putting tops on jars in hundredfold unison. Now, endless decades later, the sun dropped below the building's zigzag roof making a glowing halo around its jagged perimeter. It was se...

The couple emerged from the darkness of the great medieval hall and stood together on the sandstone threshold. Their faces, flushed with heat and relief, bore the jubilantly weary expressions of the just-wedded: of having accomplished a great task, as if the thirty-minute ceremony were a four-year work-in-progress, a continuum from first making eye contact in a street or a lecture room or a supermarket or a shoe shop, to signing their names - finally ! - with an ostentatious pen on parchment in front of a breathless, grinning celebrant.  Of course, the great stone building was not medieval; in fact it was less than a hundred years old, parts salvaged from city buildings demolished during the Depression; windows and beams and doors and staircases, ghosts of the gilded era, rising again on a hill in the rolling acres of an artists’ colony in the far northern suburbs of Melbourne.  * Cloudless early autumn Sunday. Four in the afternoon. On the forecourt in front of the great recl...

Eventually I knew that time was not on anyone’s side, let alone mine. It was not, as the human mind imagines, a kind of subterranean stream following along in parallel, a happy bubbling compliant brook.  That year, time had broken out of its former muzzled existence as a sequence of languid forty-minute school periods. I slept during those lessons. I read Tolkien. I dreamed of white foam creaming on a beach. I ate coffee scrolls at the back of the classroom.  Now, only months later and school finished for life, time ran my life rather than accommodating it. A Copal clock radio sat by my bed, its rectangular face shedding eerie green light and its mechanism infinitely flipping numbers, like a slow-motion poker machine. It had a wood-grain pattern trimmed with plastic chrome around the edges, like a Cortina’s dashboard. It woke me in darkness with the faltering but carefully enunciated syllables of the early morning Learning English program on 3AR. Or it wove bits of song into m...