What I Cooked Last Night

The highway hugged the river's voluptuous curves, staying faithful for a hundred rolling kilometres before tiring of the relationship and breaking straight northwest. The river rolled southwards and then west, betrayed by the line of red gums following it like a lost army. Then red dirt and orange groves in perfect square rows. Late in the day the sun drove shafts of light through the gaps, flickering gold on the road like a projector that has run out of film. It was still hot. Swan Hill had come and gone. No room at the inn: inn being one of those camping grounds that is a mini-city at this time of year, complete with a massive playground with lurid plastic climbing toys about a hundred feet high, a giant waterslide above that and six thousand sweltering caravans below. You could hear it coming. I stopped anyway and went into the reception office. Instead of a slamming flywire screen, you go in through an electric sensor door and are greeted by air conditioning, grey decor like ...

The first time I visited New South Wales was by river. I swam across the Murray when I was a teenager. Why walk across the bridge when you can swim? I wouldn't do it now; happy to read a book by the bank while the sun goes down. I never read before mid-afternoon. One of those habits you slip into after a lifetime of enforced academic and, later, work-related reading. But I'll read well into the night, light and eyelids permitting. Right now, it was the time of night when the birds in the trees have shut up at last and the only sound was the far-off groan of trucks on the Murray Valley Highway. The book started this way: I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant's telegram. It was at Furling, the big country house in Hampshire where I had come to convalesce after Loos, and Sandy, who was in the same case, was hunting for the marmalade. All right, that brings me to another curious first. This was the first book I read completely online: ...