What I Cooked Last Night

I like old-fashioned names, so in the unlikely case that another child of mine should struggle its unknowing way into the world, I would call it Clarence. We already have a Thomas.

“ ... It was hard to see how that value made sense.”  (Said Dr Michelle Deaker who, if anyone might see sense she might, being founder of one of Australia’s leading venture capital firms, OneVentures, as reported in today’s Business Australian “Start-up layoffs just the beginning for sector”.) Dr Deaker was referring to the buy-now pay-later sector comprised of start-ups with names that sound like 1960s family board games: Sezzle, SplitIt, Humm and Zip being the four mentioned in the story. The story quotes Zip as having lost an astounding 94% of its market ‘value’ in twelve months.  Of course those exact words were uttered in a past downturn: no, not the Great Depression, the 1970s recession or even the '87 stock market crash. It was the dot.com crash of a mere two decades ago. We could say people have short memories but mass hysteria has always trumped common sense. *Acronym time!

When Ronnie Di Stasio opened Cafe Di Stasio decades ago he jettisoned the twee travel-postered fake Italianity of some 'family style' restaurants and introduced a kind of low-key, high-class style based around a grown-up architectural sensibility and an interior design devoid of fads. Closed since January due to industry-wide staff shortages, the Herald Sun reports today that it is hoped to reopen soon.  Meanwhile, Di Stasio's other outlet,  Di Stasio Citta, near bureaucrat-central in Spring Street, lost most of its customers due to the work-from-home obsession that has, of course, outlasted the Covid panic. During that time, Di Stasio Citta also suffered heavy-handed 'trading restriction' compliance raids. "I'm not sure what six heavily armed police all entering as a raid can achieve," Di Stasio said at the time. "Terrorists hiding in the spaghetti al dente?"

These past few weeks from mid-May, which makes it a full month, seem to have been the most sustained stretch of poor weather I can remember. Incessant rain, low temperatures, and even a spring-like wind during the week that drove rain before it like bullets; and no sunshine beyond a few minutes' worth here and there - which had the effect of merely teasing you before disappearing again behind the dreary, cold, grey cloud-mass that is a constant canopy. Or was it an illusion? Schooldays had plenty of cold and wet weather. I remember the gurgling drainpipes and drumming rain drowning out a teacher's voice; wind-fanned rivulets of rain flooding the schoolyard; and running my fingers along the icy tops of front fences and walls, arriving at school almost frostbitten. We didn't worry then. We didn't have to think about roof leaks and flooded gardens and getting clothes dry.  But no: it wasn't an illusion. I heard on the radio that this has been the coldest start to a Mel...

The post office is one of those hybrid ones located in the local newsagency, a pleasant five minute walk from my front door on a cold winter day, with the sun slanting in from the north and clouds roaming across from the southwest. I try to pay most of the bills there because direct debit is the world of consumer finance's worst invention, as you cannot keep track of your balance. While waiting, I browse the wall of magazines; there has always been an excellent selection of titles across music, currents affairs and old cars, three vastly different subject areas in which I have an interest. I usually walk out with a Restored Cars or a Spectator or a Vintage Rock or even a Rolls-Royce and Bentley Driver . Until last week. I walked across the square and into the shop to pay a ridiculously high power bill. The entire east wall, instead of being covered in eye-catching magazine covers, was a shop-long panorama of slightly dusty white desolate emptiness. 'No-one buys them any mor...

Three days later. It was a long drive and almost one o’clock in the afternoon when I got out of the car to open the lop-sided gate, which had to be lashed to a tree to stay open, onto the campground. The car crunched down a gravel slope and the steep track curved around and the bend opened up a view of the creek down below. The three stood like figures in a Frederick McCubbin painting; indeed, the soft mist gathering along the creek bed, even at this time in the afternoon, made life resemble art. The tents were flattened and there was a random scattering of bags that always says we're going home, but not yet. Breakfast out of cans had been recent. There had been no mishaps or starvation or death by thirst, but one of the three had a large bruise right between the eyes. Walked into a tree at night, he said. Later, after packing less luggage than they had brought into the same space but it not fitting, I drove off the valley floor and up around curves and over elevations and out of t...

So you drive away and abandon them. It's hard to leave three teenagers in a remote place without phone coverage. Even though you know it's actually good for them. It's the anxiety of the connected age.  There had been no flat ground, so I had helped them use stones from the creek bed to build a kind of hollow cairn in which to place their stove, which was a top-heavy unit consisting of a trivet perched over a gas burner and cylinder. Put a pot of water on that, and the serious burns unit is your next stop if you're not careful. It looked like it was designed to be tipped over. And they would have to boil water because there was no tap water. Of course, I had done the same thing decades ago. Lerderderg Gorge at age sixteen; with pipe tobacco and frightening tales at night of Deliverance-style murderers stalking the valley and carving sleeping campers in their tents. We frightened ourselves half to death. In retrospect it was all good fun. Another time we'd camped by ...

Dennis Waterman, who died this week at 74, was the central character Terry McCann in British TV series Minder. I don't usually post about the deaths of actors, but Minder was my personal favourite television show of all, thanks to its intelligent cliché-free scripting, comic touches, sardonic overtones, gritty British cinematography and deft acting, unlike the ghastly face-pulling today's 'actors' carry on with. Minder's locale was seedy London with shady characters wearing suits as bright pastel colourful as the Jaguars, Capris, Volvos and Rovers they thrashed around the warehouse-lined streets of London. They'll be raising a glass at the Winchester Club tonight. Another one? Cheers, Dave.

And then that déjà vu feeling again when the sound of a soft rumbling like a distant earthquake that seemed to come from the sky but was low on the radio; one of those dreamlike trance tracks that run for seventeen minutes and involve a synthesiser recorded in a wheat silo with two overdubbed voice tracks mixed way down low. It is almost music and almost astral dust. The freeway out of Melbourne pointed east; an arrow on the map quivering around bypassed towns and heading for the mountains. We coasted along it easily, like a laden three-master under a stiff breeze. There were three teenagers on board and enough camping gear for three days. An hour and twenty minutes later we turned north at a town familiar to me from childhood days when I would get off the lazy ex-Melbourne train and be met on the platform by an aunt, my mother's younger brother's wife, who was a dumpy, non-nonsense farmer, and who would drive me in a gearbox-whining old Holden up this same road curving around ...

We haven't held this Easter vigil for two years, the church closed down by the health bureaucrats who fear that faith and spiritual succour is a threat to their earthly ersatz-religious diktats. The church was plunged into darkness. Candles were lit from the brazier, bathing the timber and columned interior in a faint glow like dying embers in a cave. The baritone sang the fifteen minute praeconium, an invitation to the light. The Exultet Paschal Praeconium hearkens, alive like a bloodline running a jagged line down through history, from some seventh-century French or Italian composer. A chill ran through me. The voice was accompanied by that aggressive, clashing, almost classical guitar style that punctuates rather than caresses the vocals, medieval-style. The lights came on. Two thousand years melted away. Happy Easter.

Buying retro crime and mystery can be a gamble if you don't know the author. Of course there are many sources of information and websites such as this one provide much information via reviews and are also quite frightening in the sense of revealing the sheer breadth of authors and titles one has yet to read. There is a certain irony in the fact that that website could now itself be regarded as 'retro', still carrying an early 2000s banner and scroll style. (A search for James McKimmey's The Long Ride led me to the site.)

It's been wall-to-wall The Saints records this week on 3PBS-FM and 3RRR-FM following frontman Chris Bailey's death earlier this week at 65. Tributes are all over the web and the 'greatest' accolades are not hype. The Saints' most well-known song - (I'm Stranded) - was voiced by the late Mr. Bailey, and I was honoured to list it at No. 52 in my list of one hundred favourite songs of the twentieth century. Look for more Saints programming in the next few days across the PBS and RRR schedules especially Neon Sunset at noon on RRR.

The Australian reported yesterday on the strange inability of Australia's chief medical officer to identify fifty percent of the nation's population: Australia’s top health bureaucrat has been slammed for refusing to provide a definition of the word “woman”. ... Liberal Senator Alex Antic posed the question to Health Secretary Brendan Murphy ... “Can someone please provide me with a definition of what a woman is?” he asked. ... The question was met with uncomfortable silence. ... "Department of Health? Definition of a man, definition of a woman? Anyone? Professor Murphy?” Senator Antic said. Finally the chief medical officer ventured a timid reply, like Oliver Twist asking for more porridge or a juvenile delinquent owning up to stealing a pig: “Look, I think there are a variety of definitions ... " "Look" ? That sentence prefix is shorthand for 'I know this is a pathetic answer but I'll give it anyway'. The CMO can't define a female but if w...

There are now 'international days' for literally everything. The concept of the 'International Day of' (or 'for') started in the middle of the last century as a promotional tool designed to advertise an issue instead of dealing with it, an idea that is now known as the largely useless modern invention of 'raising awareness’. I had to laugh, metaphorically (I didn't actually guffaw) when I was informed that today was International Carbonara Day. I'm not sure who issued or initiated the day (once again, I don't know the correct verb for the invention and dissemination of an 'international day') but it appeared in an email I receive occasionally from a magazine about Italian food. The article went on to prescribe the correct recipe for the apparently often badly-made dish, which is a simple combination of pasta, egg yolks, and cheese; or, more specifically, pasta, guanciale, egg yolk, grated pecorino, salt and pepper. 'There is no compro...