What I Cooked Last Night

It was a 'working' weekend. It was just me and the boys. I painted the lounge room floor of the beach house in the quiet morning while the boys, outside, threw toys on the roof. It was the wind , they said. Nothing to do with us . I got the ladder and a broom out three times. The floorboards are varnished clear and I redo them every few years. The painting part is easy; it’s the moving furniture. There’s always too much. I stopped at midday and cooked lunch for the boys. Sea air and flinging toys gives you an appetite. Pasta shells with canned tuna and peas and sprinkled parmesan, pancakes with maple syrup, glasses of milk. After lunch I moved some furniture back over dried sections of varnish and painted some more, and the boys played on the balcony and shot model cars off the edge and climbed down the stairs and retrieved them. Tiring of that (and speaking of retrieving) Thomas let next door’s dog, an overweight, amiable Golden Retriever in through the gate in the fence. Th...

Early afternoon. Hot. The slight northerly air was barely enough to ruffle the wavelets. The crowds were gone and the beach was almost empty. Two hundred yards offshore, a windsurfer was trying to angle his sail to the breeze, but failed, and fell in slow motion into the water. I heard the 'slap' as the sail hit the sea. That and the muffled snarl of the traffic on Point Nepean Road. Thomas was beside me silently making engineering feats in the sand with his legs. He'd been in the water and his hair was brined to his scalp and he was wet and now he was covered in sand. I was in another world. (Maigret) had not turned on the lights at once. After removing his tie and opening his collar, he had walked over to the window and leant his elbows on the sill, as thousands of other Parisians must have done that night. The air was soft like velvet, almost palpable. Not a movement, not a sound disturbed the peace of the Rue Llomond which slopes gently down towards the lights of ...

The first warm day. It was latest arrival of spring I can remember. I sat on the beach reading the weekend broadsheet while the boys tore up and down the sand. Then, following a story I had read them earlier about a windstorm blowing a beach away, they threw it. I was the victim. The idea was I had to use the paper as a shield or a tent against the gale of sand. It worked well for them. Next morning my pillow was full of sand. Tracy joined us with the small one. The gale had subsided by then and they were ready for afternoon tea. Their mother produced fresh shortbread, still warm with the characteristic grainy texture provided by the use of a combination of rice and wheat flours. They sat and munched while the small one blinked tiny eyes at her first view of sea. What do they think? Later, I walked back to the house with Tom through quiet ti tree-lined streets. It was unnaturally still. Dead. Not a car. Not a human. It was a ghost town. It must have been early in the last quarter o...

What do real estate agents know that we don't? Some time ago, Mornington Peninsula agent Briggs Shaw took an each-way bet by making one of its offices both a property agency AND a cafe . Now, prominent Point Nepean Road agency Paul Basso Real Estate has rebranded - and is now calling itself Fruit .

I was five feet up a ladder propped against a tree that was growing at a fifty degree angle to the ground, which was a hill. I was on the south side of the tree, because of the hill, and a northerly off Port Phillip Bay was blasting into my face, as was the sawdust from the branch I was sawing off. * It was Saturday afternoon. The weather was appalling, but I had a backyard full of overgrown ti-tree, a sharp saw and no excuses. I switched the radio on, tuned it to the football, turned up the volume loud enough to hear over the wind and positioned it on the ledge of the open window of the bungalow, facing out. Then I climbed the ladder, lopped branches and listened to the game. * I have criticised football commentators in the past, but I must say that Gerard Whateley has all the accuracy, enthusiasm and tonal qualities of Bruce MacAvaney but none of his verbal tics. Whateley is probably the best currently calling. (The commentator always does a better job when your team wins, ...