What I Cooked Last Night

Sometimes you can't help overhearing conversations. Even one-way ones. Occasionally the one-way ones are even more interesting, because having to imagine the unheard replies makes you listen even closer. It was late morning on a warm, overcast autumn day. I stood at the checkout queue by the customer service desk at the Rye store of one of the two major supermarkets. While I waited I daydreamed out the front window towards the beach across the road. A voice behind the service desk brought my attention back inside. It was a middle-aged staff member, talking on the phone, obviously to the store manager. She looked flustered. "A customer is coming to see you. She was here about an hour ago. She bought about six bags of shopping," the staff member was saying. "She rang the store a few minutes ago. I answered the phone. I've just hung up. She wants to bring it all back." Pause. It was the manager's turn to speak. The staff lady again: "Everyth...

The school made a little less than $30,000. That's a lot of jars of jam. That will buy some computers. The best thing isn't what they do with it, but that the children saw the work that went into it. You can hold out your hand for a government grant courtesy of the taxpayer, or you can get it the old-fashioned way: earn it. They see their mothers slaving over a stove or a sewing machine for weeks. Lucky children. They just don't know it yet.

"It's in with double ovens and out with dated laminate ... ," began the article about the Herald Sun Home Show in yesterday's paper (not online). " ... it's more a case of two ovens are better than one when it comes to cooking dinner and dessert at the same time." The item went on to talk about 'whiz-bang' coffee machines and water coolers. Go ahead. Plug them in! Then: "There is also a big push towards more energy-efficient homes in a bid to cut power bills and help the environment ... ." Maybe they carbon neutralise their dinner parties by leaving the lights off, or not having any background music. Or requesting the guests to walk home.

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...

I was 'visiting' Facebook (do people 'visit' books in the library? of course not - ridiculous) and it suggested - or even commanded, if the imperative mood is what Facebook intended - that I " Find friends from different parts of your life. " Among the list of 'friends' Facebook suggested I 'find' from different 'parts' of my life was my sister. I don't need to find my sister. I know where she is already. * A few weeks ago Facebook listed on the stock exchange after ridiculous valuations fuelled by near-hysteria. It was a bad idea to invest, but many thought it was a good one. That misapprehension lasted what, two weeks? Maybe some still think it's a good idea. We saw this twelve years ago, but they never learn. "It's not the same," everyone said, "The dotcom boom was different." I wasn't talking about the boom part, I said. They're always different, like tulips. But how they turn out is...

We have it on medical authority : eat less fish. Nothing to do with your health: doctors are not caring about you. They're thinking of the environment. In fact, they are thinking about the fish. That's a first. Doctor: "You're looking great. But don't eat any fish." Me: "Why? Isn't it good for me?" Doctor: "It's not good for the fish. Or the sea. Or ..." Me: "I'm not paying you to care about fish." Doctor: "Everyone cares about fish now. You should care about fish. There won't be any left." Me: "I thought that was the idea. You get in first and improve your gene pool. It used to be called evolution." Doctor: "It's not evolution any more. It's ethics. Ethical eating." Me: "Now I'm paying you to be a philosopher." Meanwhile, the scientists are not happy: In a submission following the draft report, the CSIRO questioned the use of the term "en...

One good thing about having children decades apart is that you can compare practices then and now and bore everyone with your insistence that things were much better then. Things weren't better then. They were just different. Children didn't walk around bristling with electronic devices in the early 1980s; they walked around bristling with hand-held games and Casio watches and Transformers. The telephone was on the wall. Teenagers used it just as much; they just couldn't take it to bed. One thing is different: children's birthday parties. There are more of them. We're averaging one a week for William and Thomas from their friends at school and kindergarten. You can't attend all of them. Occasionally these birthday parties are hosted in the child's actual house, where their mother serves party food and cake. Increasingly, however, people other than parents host the party and it is held off the premises in cavernous places that used to be warehouses or f...

The only hand-held devices you can use at this restaurant are your knife and fork. "Only six months ago we never saw an iPad, but I've had a two-year-old in here with an iPad - it's a joke," co-owner Nabil Kurban said. "We are just letting people know that being at the dinner table for the family is the most valuable time of the day so that people can say, 'How are you, how's your day, is everything OK?' "It's a very special moment. We are just asking for one hour a day - no gadgets at the dinner table."

Friday night. Late. The wreckage of another week lay in my wake, bobbing about randomly before disappearing into some dark crevice of memory. The morning had brought some good news, via email naturally, releasing me from a hideous one month contract of writing impossible bureaucratese for a client whose acquaintance with the English language ended, or began, I’m not sure which, with ‘digital contact points’, which they shorten to DCP, because everyone knows what they are, of course. They have acronyms in every paragraph and they capitalise words to give them more importance. Goodbye. Then the telephone had rung. Yes, some people still ring you up. The person ringing me up was an old work acquaintance of the nice kind, wanting to know if I was free on Monday for a month. That was like losing the wicked witch and gaining Snow White. Later, finishing a morning’s business in the city, I had ridden the escalator down into Melbourne Central Station under a backlit sign advertising Earth...

People used to approach me in the street with a loud greeting and a smile and I would open my mouth to answer them, and then they would walk straight past me and I would realise they were talking on phones connected by wires to their ears. Then I would shut my mouth and determine not to be fooled again by such an obvious if unintended trick. But I always was. Now it's different. No-one looks at you any more because they're walking down the street with their heads down, gazing into 'apps', a word I don't like.

I had an email from the Old Collegians, who organise events - usually golf, football or wine tastings - that they consider might be of interest to the college community: Dear Old Collegian A happy healthy lifestyle - that's what we all want. As a member of the Old Collegians community, you are warmly invited to the Life Insurance Advisers' Men's Health Forum on Wednesday 12th May from 7pm. Prominent speakers will discuss Nutrition Made Easy, Heart and Kidney Tips and much more. Free on-the-spot blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass index tests will be conducted, with a Doctor on hand to discuss results if required. Enjoy complimentary nibbles with drinks from the bar.

I was talking to Clyde at the track last night. Clyde is retired and was complaining that he didn't have the time to be retired, because of children's activities. He feels a little cheated, like a horse that discovers the carrot is plastic after galloping five miles for it. "One has piano Tuesday nights, tennis Wednesdays and something else on Fridays," he told me. I forget what the something else was; some kind of martial art thing in which they wear white clothes and throw their limbs about. "Two has violin two days a week and basketball on weekends," he went on, "and three - the youngest at six - has swimming and little athletics. Little athletics at six! And the parents coach from the sidelines." Clyde, a veteran runner, was shocked at the idea of 'coaching' a six-year-old. I said something about the workhouses in Britain in the nineteenth century. "Children don't have time to play in the mud any more, or collect snails,...

Sunday lunch at mother’s house. “Just a sandwich, Mum,” I had called down the telephone, but she continues to replicate the customary hot Sunday lunch – then called dinner – of the 1950s. Not quite the full roast mutton and the overboiled vegetables and the chocolate pudding with whipped cream, but even on a forty degree day you’ll be offered something hot and a lot of it. These days it’s usually a series of casseroles, unrelated in both design and contents, and always enough to feed an army. Just when you think the table is full, she hauls another scorching baking dish out of the lower depths of the blazing oven. She announces each dish in an increasingly eccentric manner, as if we had no idea what a tuna casserole looked like. “This is lasagne,” she announces, “with meat in it!” Mother sounds like a lepidopterist describing a newly discovered exotic butterfly to an audience of amateurs. We sat down. Sure enough: “This is a corn and zucchini slice I made yesterday for the boys,” she...