What I Cooked Last Night

The middle child—teenager for a few more weeks—has confidence in the kitchen, throwing things around with abandon. He did the same when a chair-bound infant, but they all do that, except the ones who studiously pick things apart on their plate, as if having just discovered their fingers. They will be lawyers.  As a kind of purist (the quality jumped a generation here) he insists, for instance, that cream must not be in the same kitchen as spaghetti carbonara, lest someone combine them. (And here I was, a kitchen charlatan, disparaging  al dente pasta.) In all seriousness, he understands that true purism is not perfectionism but a perceptive understanding of an original idea. Roman standard cacio e pepe  is ideal, being disarmingly simple but surprisingly tricky to execute, according to some ‘experts’.  Cacio e Pepe Use long pasta. The idea is to allow the strands to finish cooking in a cheesy ‘sauce’—really just a coating; an oleaginous dressing. This comprises grat...

In 2021 I posted a list of songs, ranked in order of personal choice, from one hundred to one. I was fascinated by the obsession with ranking things, and tried to demystify the process by making one myself; a kind of contrary similia similibus curantur . Of course, having posted my top hundred I immediately disagreed with many of my own selections, vindicating my scepticism about lists*. But I had already undertaken the experiment a couple of decades earlier and completely forgotten about it. The older list was a top ten of the 1990s, published on one of my early 2000s nouveau siècle weblogs, of which everyone seemed to have several at the time. It surfaced recently out of the internet like a lost vegetable peeler turning up in the compost. For purely historical interest, here is the initial post followed by the first five songs. * It’s 2004: time I posted my favourite songs of the 1990s. There's no point rushing it. Time gives you perspective. … In the 1990s, my first marriage ha...

A large television screen cast a lurid blue glow over the foyer. On the screen, an exclamation mark inside a triangle, like a road sign warning of a bridge down, drew attention to the words below:  'This show contains guns and physical violence, firearms, death, explicit language, sexual content, apocalyptic themes and depiction of a nuclear disaster. Please be advised that this show contains loud noises, flashing, intense lighting and the use of haze.' I thought it was parody. Of course, it might have been both warning and parody at the same time. You can’t tell. The last play I saw in the university, decades ago, was Oedipus Rex, performed in the old Union House theatre near Wilson Hall. Years later the theatre moved a hundred metres to the arts and cultural centre, a swirling architectural fantasy that has an interior with no straight lines and a colour scheme like blueberries in a blender.  * He took a hansom to the university. The drive occupied twenty minutes, but by the...

His fingers—hands—were always busy. They had a life of their own, drumming, twisting, elucidating; not in the Neapolitan gesticulating sense, but in a kind of hand language of his own.  We sat in the cafe—teenagers on the brink of twenty—and drank coffee, and talked about our lives, because they were ahead of us. David’s hands unfolded like a bird’s wings or a carnate Greek statue, his symmetry disturbed only by the heavy black curl over his pale forehead. So there was European in his blood, probably Spanish. The café, at the top of Bourke Street, was long and narrow, with red-topped stools running in a row back to the kitchen. Behind the bar, the bow-tied waiters smiled and made coffee and spoke stage Italian. After drinking coffee, enlivened, we would cross a lane into a cramped bookshop, and browse, and envisage our unfolding lives represented in the pages of the authors and poets to which we gravitated: Whitman, Genet, Joyce, White, Bellow, the usual French and Russians; the Be...