What I Cooked Last Night

It used to be a department store, with six floors, linked by an escalator, with ceilings and interior walls and oil heating; and that was a long time ago, because buildings don’t have oil heating any more. Then the department store closed and architects turned the building into a warehouse ‘shell’, and ripped out the top ceiling revealing skylights way above, and took away the concealing walls and heating pipes, and painted the stone cold walls behind them white; and, finally, cut a giant longitudinal floor-to-ceiling hole - almost the length of the building – through the floors on five levels, and put a steel stairway in the hole, with wire rope barriers winding around each level, so you didn’t go over the edge and fall to the ground. It looked like H division at Pentridge. You could stand at the bottom and monitor the inmates behind the wire around the perimeter at every level. Then the building was leased to a company whose workers sat at computer terminals all day, and froze. ...

My sister is two years and six months in the photo, taken by my father one hot January day in 1966, with date and location written on the back. Question: which Melbourne CBD building hosted this rooftop carnival? The fragment of building in the background may give a clue. Or not. Take a wild guess in comments below. Answer in a couple of days.

They called it sticker shock in the 1990s recession–or was it the 1980s?–referring to overnight rises on price stickers shocking shoppers. We are about to experience bill shock. I could call it electric shock, but that might be a little dramatic. I anticipated this some time ago, well before any mention of a carbon tax. In fact, we have to go right back to 2005, after I bought this house . When I first inspected the house, a 1948 weatherboard bungalow, its operational economy was apparent. Today you’d say the house had ‘green credentials’ or was ‘eco-friendly’; but it simply had very few lights and no built-in appliances. Frugality was written all over it. It was a sale by the estate of the original owner; possibly someone who grew up in the shadows of the 1930s depression. There was a single gas heater in the lounge room and the rest of the house was unheated; there was no air-conditioning, no dishwasher, no exhaust fan in the bathroom (but an enormous sash window that, raised a...

... an enormous building made from concrete curves and no roof unfolded itself into view on the top of a hill. It looked like a postmodern milking shed the size of the Sydney Opera House. We came close and the curves snaked past and a sign that said Port Phillip Estate, and then the whole thing poured itself into the rear vision mirror and disappeared. Maybe I imagined it. I had not imagined it. It was this building. It's won awards , of course. You're doing well if your building wins awards as well the wine inside it.

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...

The first of spring, it rained most of the day. At lunchtime I walked from Collins Street up narrow Church Lane, where noodle shops and tiny cafes gaze at each across cobblestones. Water was escaping from an ancient round iron manhole cover and running across the stones. Umbrellas collided apologetically, and smokers banished to the wet street huddled into shop windows and shielded their cigarettes from the rain and the sanctimonious. I crossed Little Bourke where Church Lane becomes Church Street, because it is wider, and runs behind the AMP plaza, a 1969 tribute to rake-angled brown marble and corporate sculpture . The buildings and plaza were completely encased in demolishers’ hessian, like a Cristo installation. Is it coming down or being ‘renovated’? And what have they done with Clement Meadmore's Awakening ? Don’t know. I got a sandwich - chicken, avocado, tomato and cheese on sourdough - from the food plaza in Bourke near King Street and went back to the office. Later, w...

Nicholson Street is a twentieth century shipwreck of architecture. It is a magnificent mess. It is a proud dowager wearing a faded dress and cobwebs. It is a jumble of Victorian shopfronts and Edwardian houses and 1950s grease monkey workshops and accountants’ offices and suburban law firms and Thai cafes and factories making God knows what. Nicholson Street is tattoo parlours and ugly video stores and bicycle shops and newspaper publishers and pasta manufacturers and student houses with Tibetan flags across their front doors, bikes on their front porches and naked bulbs glowing in uncovered windows. And trams run through it. * I was on foot, heading south on the west side, the North Carlton side. It was dusk, almost six o’clock, and bleak. A tram trailing phosphorescent dust flew north, loaded to the gunwales with scarved and wired commuters bound for the home fires of East Brunswick, and red wine, and Mozart. I walked past Bande a Part, a pizza place for Franco-cinephiles where...

If you visit a place called The Tofu Shop you kind of know what you are going to eat. I used to eat there when I worked near Bridge Road, in that old red brick building that used to be a shirt factory and became an office block in the late eighties, when Australia was busy exporting manufacturing. The old red brick building had a neon sign on its roof that read 'PELACO' and I worked directly beneath the 'E'. I used to go to The Tofu Shop ('The' was part of its name, hence the capital T, although it looks wrong) because I liked the way they layered their dishes. You didn't just get a slab of soy curd, slippery and shaking like a jellyfish, on a plate. Instead, they used to layer textures and tastes in a way that kept you interested, like reading a thriller. Frameworks of steamed vegetables, grains of various kinds and legumes were built over with salads, the starring home-made tofu, or a combination of ingredients; and then topped with yogurt, or garlic o...