What I Cooked Last Night

Into the trolley, the shopper places a shrink-wrapped four-pack of empty jars. The jars have matching red and white checked metal lids, simulating the real gingham fabric circles that traditionally were cut with pinking scissors and tied with string around the necks of re-used jars containing home-made jams, pickles, chutneys and preserved fruits; and were either gifted or stored on high shelves for use in winter when fresh fruits and vegetables were scarce. Alright, nobody does that any more. But the shrink-wrapped four-pack of cheap jars with imitation lids makes it feel like you can. Kind of a nostalgic short-circuit, without the mess, or the cooking time. The shopper, pushing the trolley neatly around the end of aisle six and into seven in a perfect arc, accelerates slightly (it was close to dinner time) and stops halfway along the aisle where seventeen brands and fifty-seven sub-varieties of pasta sauce sit waiting to be turned alchemy-like into someone’s home-cooked dinner. Five ...

No. That was today at Coburg High School’s ‘Dress to the Decade’ day. From left, Thomas, Alexandra and William.

On a north-facing block that slopes down in that direction, the house takes advantage of low-slung winter sun, which slides up onto the couch in the front room, a warm slab of mid-morning gold, falling off the other end later, like a guest that came for lunch and drank too much sherry. No sun today; steel-grey sky over a pale lemon rim and a mean wind swirling. I walked out the front gate and around the corner and up the next street where  autumn’s last yellowed leaves, tossed in the air, flickered gold like the last frames of a super eight film. Home movies. Silence, flickering, peopled by the dead. Relations. They call them relatives now. Aunts, uncles, bearded, spectacled, tentative smiles, lost, dead. Mechanical movements, except when they stood still like my grandmother who thought my father’s super eight camera was a box brownie. ‘Stand still,’ she said to the younger ones, blond haired heads flying around down among the adult goal-post immovable legs. 1967. Manfred Mann. Sum...

Pride comes before a fall and hubris (literally and metaphorically in defiance of the gods, since the ‘accountancy’ firm PwC was so woke any concept of god was anathema). Yes, I’m full of Greek today. Nemesis is in the air, hovering with an upswept, knife-bearing, clothed arm. Seven years ago  I  alluded to the sanctimonious nature of modern capitalism with particular reference to this company, with a  2018  update. Sanctimonious? Try ‘corrupt'. Some select quotes from the last few days' news: PwC's acting chief executive Kristin Stubbins may now face questions as (to why) she sat on a NSW district health board during the time her firm was awarded millions of dollars in contracts to that district.  - News, The Australian Business Review, 1 June Earlier this year, Tim Ryan, chair of PwC's giant US operation ... said: "Building trust has never been more important." ...  The shocking abuse of trust at PwC's tax advisory arm has shredded the reputatio...

This one was accidental. It happens every year. (They self-seed, probably falling off one of last year’s plants and sleeping in the soil all winter before springing into life in spring.) This specimen grew in a hole about six inches square in the concrete by the fence; once the repository of an old fencepost. Last summer there was a tomato in the old trough close by; this rogue plant was probably an escaped fruit from that, rolling down the slant into the slight depression.  It grew tall. I couldn't - or didn't bother to - drive a stake into the hole but I tied a kind of restraint on the fence rail around it, like a seat belt. It outgrew that, flopping forward, wanting territory. So after I  considered ripping it out I commuted it to King’s pleasure (archaic legal term), thus anthropomorphising it, and propped its spreading vines over a plastic chair; one of those white stacking ones that cost about $10 at Bunnings. The plant was most appreciative, spreading further and envelo...

Maybe read James Joyce before agreeing with that. Italy has joined up with France, Spain and Portugal to stop ‘health warnings’ on bottled wine following Irish legislation requiring such patently stupid health bureaucrat-driven interventions.  “It’s totally wrong to compare the excessive consumption of northern countries to the moderate and knowledgeable consumption of quality and lower alcohol-content drinks that in Italy are emblematic of a leisurely way of life,” (said head of Italian agricultural lobby group Coldiretti Ettore Prandini). Coldiretti is also combatting nanny-state notices on such food items as cheese and salami. Some Irish share the scepticism. Agreed Cormac Healy of Drinks Ireland: “… an example of zealotry …”. Yes, perhaps ironic coming from an Irish lobby group; nevertheless a life lived confronted by warnings on everything may be more deleterious to long-term health than that ‘leisurely way of life’ untroubled by health bureaucrats and politicians lurking in e...

What makes it rustic? asked someone when I pretentiously named the dish I had just cooked. Unrefined and straightforward, yet warm and inviting, rustic (cuisine) is typically based on old-fashioned preparation techniques, ingredient availability, and specific cultural/culinary influences, I should have replied; but not wanting to sound like an AI chatbot, I just muttered something about using what was in the fridge. There had been half a roast chicken and a tub of peas, thanks to the chicken shop where Tom now works after school. Run by an enterprising husband and wife originally from Iran, the shop is not one of those dreadful franchises, so Tom has neither to wear a red uniform nor serve at a drive-through window, and the owners overwhelm him with generous take-outs at the end of shifts, and he comes home redolent of charcoal and spices and carrying bagfuls of delicious chicken roasted and stuffed with some unique blend of breadcrumbs that carries a faint rumour of exotic Persian sp...

She had lived in Australia for sixty years, she told me. Her father, one of two brothers, of Cypriot origin, had migrated here from Egypt. The brother had moved around the same time to London. So her cousins had grown up on the other side of the world. One day in the early 1970s, one of them had visited her house, which was in a suburb near the airport; a house in which she still lived. The cousin had been in Australia for a series of concerts and had visited his antipodean cousins before flying back to London. He had been emotional during his visit and had cried one night. She had asked him why, and he had said that he had never seen such a happy family, and that for all he owned, it was the one thing he had never had. The lady must have been in her early eighties. I had never met her before. She had come into the jewellery shop where I was now working part-time, and we had struck up a conversation for some reason. People name-drop: you can always tell. But her eyes had the faraway lo...

Last time I posted a 'product of the month' was in 2009 - and that product no longer exists due to package artwork that is no longer acceptable to First World sensibilities. A good start in rectifying the fourteen-year hiatus is Barry's tea, a premium tea with magnificent flavour that doesn't turn into tannin-dominated mud after extended brewing like many. Barry's offers far better economy compared to its main premium supermarket competitor, at around 15 cents per teabag in its Gold Blend 80-pack, compared to over 50 cents per teabag in T2's 60-pack at $32.

Brod Smith and I worked as copywriters in an advertising agency in Tooronga in the 1990s. He lived in Preston - or was it Reservoir? - I in Brunswick. He had founded the 1970s band The Dingoes. * Cup Eve, 1973. St Teresa’s hall. The Dingoes followed by Madder Lake. The volume unheard of, keeping awake the denizens of an Essendon previously undisturbed by insanely loud 1970s music. * Brod Smith died early this week. His music  didn’t .

Because according to the Financial Times here’s what Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway thinks of them: (Many … are little more than) “fortune tellers or astrologers who are dragging money out of their clients’ accounts, which [is] not being earned by any useful service”.

OK, since we're delving into history, one of memory's first tunes was that haunting mournful melody Jamaica Farewell . I found the song hypnotic although I was disturbed about the little girl being left in Kingston town, imagining her to be my age - two.

Matt Taylor was a failure, kicked out of school for wearing his hair too long and spurned by the girl he loved. He left the hick city of Brisbane in search of intelligent life on earth, and discovered the blues in Beechworth. In 1973 he recorded a six-minute twelve-second open wound of blues delivered in a voice so raw it hurts.  Albert Collins on Taylor:  "You play the blues but it's like no other blues I've ever heard in my life."

The Barry Humphries award, named after the mid-to-late century absurdist and humourist - was cancelled because they (Melbourne Comedy Festival bureaucrats or humour-vettors or whatever they call themselves) were too stupid - comprehensively stupid - to understand parody.  The humourist has died. Humphries outlasted the death of humour, if not the grim, grasping, unseeing stare of the  woke ungendered zombie class of humanoids, for whom funniness is death.