What I Cooked Last Night

This 1962 edition of Horace McCoy's No Pockets in a Shroud was clothed in the typically gritty Penguin Crime design sensibility of the time featuring a murky photograph of a newspaper in a monochrome gutter. Oh to have been a fiction cover designer in the early 1960s. But Penguin often published earlier titles. It's an old game: I start reading and try to pick the original publication date. There are usually plenty of period clues, but sometimes few. * Reporter Michael Dolan walks into his managing editor's office to be told his story has been spiked: commercially 'sensitive'. The manager of the baseball team that has deliberately thrown a series has connections. Dolan resigns, sets up his own newspaper, having a list as long as your arm of corruption ready to print: all the stories his former employer refused to run. The corrupt baseball series story is followed by revelation of the death of the husband of the woman with whom Dolan has had an ongoing affai...

On the long sweltering days of a late summer I like, if I can find the time, to switch on my internal air conditioning by reading something from another time, another place, another climate. One of my favourite things to read (we could be talking 'genres' if we were a book club, but we are not) is period fiction and I don't mean regency romances but gritty 1960s British thrillers. Eugene George was a pen-name of Paul Chevalier. (They all seemed to have pen-names - nom de plume to you, Mr Book Club Guy.) George/Chevalier wrote only a few books and is unknown to the extent that you cannot google him, but I Can See You But You Can't See Me is a masterpiece of the sinister British style. (My short review posted at Neglected Books , a godsend for readers now listed in the sidebar.) I Can See You But You Can't See Me by Eugene George Hamish Hamilton, London, 1966

Why don't people throw out ballpoint pens that no longer work? You want to shout at these people. It doesn't work! Throw it out! I was in an office recently and, of nine ballpoint pens sitting in one of those plastic pen caddies given out by print suppliers or pharmaceutical companies, six didn't work*. I've been thinking about this and I have several theories why the pens never get thrown out and end up back in the drawer. Theory 1 A ballpoint pen that has run out of ink doesn't look broken - and people only throw out things that look broken. Theory 2 They are not sure whether the pen has run out of ink. They think it might be that the paper is waxy. The pen gets the benefit of the doubt. Theory 3 My most compelling theory: people are lazy and the waste bin is too far away. Straight back in the drawer. * There's a thesis in this. Maybe a book. Where's my pen? * *I put them back. It was not my office. It wasn't my job to thro...

" ... in the next few years he is ... upset at the injustice and hypocrisy that exist in the world: a world in which some men are athletic stars, James Bonds and millionaires and he is not; he is morally appalled. In his dreams he recreates the world, righting all wrongs, eliminating suffering, redistributing wealth ... ending all wars. He becomes a reincarnation of Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ ... Evil governments topple, corrupt churches collapse, laws are revised, and Truth, written in Xeroxed tablets of stone ... presented to the world." Or on Twitter. Or Facebook. Anyone can take part. The description of the keyboard warrior and his (or her, pedants) delusions of grandeur are well described - in a 1971 novel by George Cockcroft under the pseudonym Luke Rinehart. * The Diceman Luke Rhinehart, Granada, 1971 Kitchen Hand's one-sentence summary: dated parody of psychoanalysis clothed (but often unclothed) in early 1970s post-psychedelic era preoccupations. * (T...

Newspapers are reporting a study that found music lyrics are not as happy as they used to be. I could have told you that twelve years ago .

They impelled themselves in mad arcs, rather than flew, towards the porch light: airborne armadas of brown hard-backed buzzing creatures about half an inch long. But they did not see the wall and they crashed into it. And then they fell on the floor, upside down, and could not right themselves. I put around citronella candles. But they were not deterred. Because they are not mosquitoes. They were attracted. One zeroed in on a candle like a kamikaze pilot at a navy ship, and found itself upside down in molten wax, waving clawed tentacles or legs or whatever an entomologist calls them in the air. I picked him out because I felt pity for such utter stupidity. I threw him into the darkness, away from the porch, but the wax probably solidified in the air and he will end up a fossil to be discovered by some future scientist sixty million light years from now. A beetle embalmed in wax! It was nine o'clock, a warm night with a northerly still blowing straight down from the Queensland...

They shut the Oak Park pool for a year and renovated it. The low curved cream-brick walls topped with white wrought iron detailing are gone, as are the cascading concrete steps and the multi-coloured 1960s seats, and the general retro atmosphere of the place. Now it's angular blocks and steel and seats made from recycled drinks bottles, and an entrance foyer with a revolving glass cylinder door more typical of an office block. But there are still large swathes of lawn, and some trees for shade, and the elephant is still there; but he is no longer pink and water no longer spurts from his trunk. 42 degrees tomorrow. Hemingway is already in the bag by the front door with the towels and sunscreen. Full circle. There was a time when I could read, when the boys were small and stayed in the toddler pool. Then they grew and needed supervision as they leapt into pools, and dived, and tore around the place. So the books stayed at home and I supervised. But now they are old enough to look...

The Herald Sun , among other newspapers , reports on an intergalactic collision: A collision between two massive black holes generated ripples in time and space and formed another black hole, 80 times bigger than the sun, according to a new discovery by Australian and international scientists. When? Yesterday? It doesn't say. But caution is advised: In total, four black hole collisions have been detected ... "These were from four different binary black hole systems smashing together and radiating strong gravitational waves out into space," ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering's Professor Susan Scott said. And I was worried about snakes . But look out, there's more to come: ... a third observational run by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) next year would add to the identification of 10 black-hole mergers and one neutron star collision. Just to be on the safe side, I'm digging a bunker in the backyard this weekend. Meanw...

" ... I for one found NAB chairman Ken Henry's appearance before the royal commission a refreshing surprise - and the almost universal criticism of him unfair and indeed bizarre. And also a telling exercise in the media 'group-think' fawning over the RC. ... essentially damning Henry for not playing by the ritualistic abasement script ...demanded in those appearing." OK, at least someone has balls. Maybe we're getting somewhere: "My only criticism would be that he didn't kick back more strongly." Watch the keening, fawning Twitter tribes were that to happen.

Forget Rowena Orr v. Catherine Livingstone. I wrote the Banking Royal Commission script ten years ago . If the bankers had had any balls at all (and I'm talking about the blokes) the exchanges would have proceeded along the following lines (from the link above): BANKER: Fine. It was a question. Thanks for clearing that up. Now I’ll answer it. Firstly, as I said earlier, I'm no seer. Nor am I a morals crusader, a nanny, a pastor, a household budgetary advisor, a schoolteacher of mathematics, an economics lecturer, a logician or a homespun philosopher. I'm a banker, even if the title is misleading today. Banks used to bank money, now they just it shovel it out the front door to passersby, who sometimes give it back, with interest. Sometimes. Maybe a bit less so lately. But I haven't the time, the inclination, the necessity nor even the legal capability of assessing a borrower's home life, spending habits, financial intentions or any one of a number of other indica...

One day a long time ago, when I was 12, two white objects arrived on the same day at the house where I lived. The first white object. The first white object was a piece of glossy white-coated cardboard folded into a perfect square. It was a record album. The title of the album - The Beatles - was embossed into the cover. My older sister brought it home. She liked things like that. She had often brought home similar objects, but the others had been brightly coloured. We went into the white room and she folded out the cardboard square, took out the first disc and placed it on the record-player, which was a small grey box with a single speaker in its detachable lid. The sound of a jet taking off came out of the mono speaker. Later there were onions, noise, raccoons, murder, sex in public, crying guitars, guns, pigs and playground equipment which an American madman later misunderstood to be something else. I sat in the white room and listened to this jumble when a soft humming n...

My father didn't cook but he made his special salad sometimes and it was huge and served in one of those fat rounded highly-polished blond-wood bowls that were big in the 1960s. The salad had tomato and celery and onion and a few other ingredients that I can't remember but it was sweet and acid and crunchy at the same time, and he said he got the recipe from somewhere, if you could call it a recipe, and I presumed it was from one of the cafes. He sold crockery to the hospitality industry but in those days it was mainly hotels; they had the bulk of the business, which is why on the backs of those 1960s hotel cups and saucers you often see the words 'vitrified hotel china' and sometimes the brand 'John Dynon & Sons'. Years later I sat at the bar in Pellegrini's looking at the curling photographs either side of the yellowed mirror behind the waiters. It was 1976. A timber menu board with scalloped edges hung overhead at the end of the room and what was on...

The broad beans were good this year and gave plenty of fat beans of the same soft grey they used to paint Bentleys with. We got the children to pick them and pod them because that is what children's fingers are supposed to do . Also they don't have devices anyway. They put the beans in a bowl on the table and threw the pods on the floor to be swept up later. Then we cooked them. Pasta shells with broad beans, cauliflower and walnuts. Boil two cups of broad beans until they turn bright green and swell. Drain the beans and return them to the pan with some olive oil, a finely chopped clove of garlic, the juice of half a lemon and some ground pepper. Fry on low heat for a few minutes. Cook your pasta shells and add some cauliflower florets towards the end. Meanwhile, warm some halved walnuts in a pan ensuring they don't burn but just develop a nice deep tan. Then drain the pasta and cauliflower, toss the walnuts through, and top with the beans along with any retaine...

How long does red wine last, opened? I had opened the bottle, a very rich, purplish-black Langhorne Creek shiraz of 14%-alcohol strength, only a day or two earlier, and I had left it unfinished, stored in a dark cupboard. I had forgotten to replace the screwcap, which was sitting by its side. The bottle had just over a glass left. It should be fine, I thought to myself. I decanted it slowly into the glass and there was still an inch left. * I cooked the steak, flipped and turned it so that the grill marks made perfect squares. Ninety seconds each side. Rare. The potatoes were already done, as were the asparagus and the fried onions and the pepper sauce. I served it up and sat at the big round table in the kitchen of the beach house where I can eat and read at the same time. I had been going through some old online newspapers from the 1940s researching a job I'm working on. (It's taking longer than it should, because I keep finding interesting items in the old newspapers...