What I Cooked Last Night

It was just a slightly complicated garden if you were visiting, but if you had to work on it, it was a jungle. I was working on it, first time in years. "Mow the lawn," was the brief, but that was just shorthand for tidy the garden after forty years of neglect. And 'lawn' was a metaphor, albeit a possibly unintended one, unless she was being ironic. Language is difficult. The canopies of some of trees were just about down to the ground so it was hard to get the mower underneath let alone myself, being six feet tall. I kind of laid flat and pushed it under like one of those roller trolleys mechanics use to slide under cars. Other sections of lawn were dotted with various rampant ground cover plantings that had wandered from the areas intended to be covered. I went around these and erred on the side of mowing as much of them back as possible. Half an hour of lawnmower gymnastics and the air was thick with dirt. There hadn't been a lot of grass at many points....

This city is obsessed with coffee, that milky, jittery, machined addiction made by poseurs who call themselves baristas. Just look at our major waste problem, the environmental disaster that is disposable take-away coffee cups littering the inner city. Disposable was supposed to mean single use, not throw it on the footpath or out the window or leave it under the train seat or on the park bench. They're everywhere. And now, the disposables are carried in a disposable cardboard multi-cup carrier. Insane. Aside from all that, no drink should ever be taken from cardboard or that abomination, polystyrene. Ban the lot of them. Hot drinks should only ever be drunk from porcelain or glass. All those inner urban Green-voting hipsters should live up to their 3Rs mantras. Reuse, recycle ... or recant, pretenders. That brings us to the superior drink, tea; drunk by the silent minority – perhaps even majority – and appreciated for its loftier qualities, its more subtle pleasures. While cof...