What I cooked last night.

A blue-and-white sky afternoon. An impatient autumn breeze searches for leaves. I am lying on my stomach in the school playground, gazing at the small seeds, like tiny dimpled bullets, in the stalks of the unmown grass, and imagining the stalks are trees, and that I am in an aeroplane.  The school building is an L-shaped angle in the south-east corner of an oblong bounded by Muriel Street to the north, Teague to the south, and Garnet to the west. Half the playground is paved in bitumen, embedded with screenings designed to prevent children slipping in the wet - the ground is on an incline - but which result in dreadful knee and elbow grazes when children fall at speed, often. The rest of the oblong is the field it has always been, and forms probably the best kind of playground, despite play experts later recommending steel swings, multi-coloured plastic climbing pyramids, or forts made from treated pine, all of which remove perspective and the sense of clear distance.  I can s...

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After the film was over, we walked out into a curtain of Ballarat darkness. I was reminded yet again of when I  had been taken to a cinema at age nine in the city on a hot, sun-drenched afternoon. Afterwards, we had exited after 174 minutes of The Sound of Music into a darkened 1966 Collins Street streetscape lit only by the yellowish headlamps of ranked taxis. I had felt somehow cheated, as if the sun outside should have held still while I was in the grip of the film’s illusive progression of time. We walked back to the railway station where the enormous canteen was still open. Shelves loomed behind tall counters and bain maries, and a swirl of round tables and attendant chairs on the floor overlooked Platform One through vast glass panes, designed in the early twentieth century to allow partakers of morning or afternoon tea to see the Melbourne train arrive - as if they hadn’t heard the engine’s shrieking whistle from miles away. We ordered chicken schnitzel rolls and sat at one...