What I Cooked Last Night

Extract: English literature and expression were lazy, wonderful journeys into other times and places with Mr Johns; along with Mr Forster, Mr Lawrence and Mr Eugene O'Neill. Each of these literary sojourns was brought to a sudden end by the thrumming electric bell and echoing crash of locker doors in the corridor outside as students swapped books for the next period. Wednesday sport still provided mid-week relief from the classroom. Until later, when we were thrown headlong into the workforce's unbroken week, we little realised the benefit of this. Some of us found that getting out for a run on Wednesday afternoons was the perfect way to clear our heads of jargon and the scaremongering futurology of Alvin Toffler. Alternating between running and boundary umpiring, I'd be on a bus for cross-country at Bundoora or Mentone one week; the next I'd be taking a sly peep under my arm before trying to fling a football directly into ruckman Simon Madden's arms. I needn...

And here's the one that was too big to carry around town last week. Are books expensive? Unanswerable. Is a $90 book too expensive? Unanswerable, but the answer is no, anyway. You can put $90 into your tank and tear it up in an afternoon driving down the coast, but the $90 book takes you around the world and not just once and you keep it for life. I can't see a book of this scale (hardback, 480 pages) making much margin even at the price. They sell glossy magazines a tenth of the weight at a quarter the price and full of nothing. Nor are books subsidised by ads for watches and Burberry and single barrel Scotch. This is not a cook book. They just sell it out of that section because there are recipes in it. It's a two-kilogram rebuke to purists who insist that only those who hail from such parts may write about them. Christine Manfield an expert on India? She is now. Buy it for the photography. Not of food; though that is there. The teeming cities; the mysterious wate...