What I Cooked Last Night

Ten o’clock on a cool Sunday morning. The sun was still behind the clouds and there was dew on the grass, along with seventy French cars. What was I doing at the French Car Festival? I felt like a traitor as I parked the 940 under an oak tree beside the road that runs through the grounds of the park, got out, poked my eye on an oak twig, helped the children out, shut the doors, left the car and walked towards the gate where a lady with a PCCV logo on her coat was selling entry tickets. Then on to the greensward where sat twenty or more Citroens, about a dozen Renaults, perhaps twice the number of Peugeots, a few Simca Vedettes, and a couple of oddities, if you allow that all French cars are not oddities. People were poring over open bonnets and gazing at engines, which in the case of some of the Renaults, was at the other end of the car. The last time I saw this many French cars in one place was in the underground car park outside Baillieu library at Melbourne University in the 197...

It's the little things that get you. Like when you reach for something you absolutely must have at that particular second, and it isn't there. Because if it isn't there, it could be anywhere; which means whatever you are doing in the kitchen will be ruined by the time you make enquiries of the rest of the household as to the whereabouts of the missing item: your best knife, the corkscrew, the only colander in the house, an oven mitt, the kitchen sink plug. Whatever. All of these things have a number of potential alternative uses in a household that comprises inventive or enterprising people. Take my favourite small dish, for example. It was just the right size to hold olives or a pat of butter for the table. Emblazoned with the University of Melbourne crest and the words Melbourne University Union House Cafeteria in black, the white porcelain bowl also made an excellent talking point. (And no, I didn't steal it.) One day, a long time ago now, I had taken a stick ...

July 1974 was the middle of an unusually cold and nasty winter. I was in the last year of school. That month, I saw an evening performance of Oedipus at Colonus at the Melbourne University Union theatre and froze on the tram on the way home. That July, I also had my first cinema date. I took the girl by tram to the newly-opened Cinema Centre in Bourke Street. Acres of electric blue velour chairs swept down to a giant screen about half a mile away, and more acres of electric blue velvet draped the walls, downlit in the folds by continuous hidden fluorescent strips. The walls concealed new sensurround speakers that made you think you were going down with the ship in The Poseidon Adventure . It was the last word in 1970s cinema décor and it was hideous. Oh, the movie: Chinatown . I had kind of forgotten about it. I half-remembered the darkness, Faye Dunaway and a score that sounded like a Formula One race in slow motion. Or something. Then it all came back, thanks to this Terry Tea...