Originally published by The Clifton Courier, June26, 2021

It’s funny what you don’t notice until you do.

Like how it took me years to notice the spelling of The Beatles was different to your garden variety beetles. This is particularly puzzling as back in my I’m-not-like-other-girls teenage phase I would listen to them quite a lot and even owned a Beatles t-shirt. I had also seen that episode of The Simpsons where they parody The Beatles many, many times. There’s a scene in the episode where Homer, Apu, Barney and Principal Skinner try to come up with a name for their band. “We need a name that’s witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it,” Principal Skinner says. Then they call themselves the B Sharps. And despite all this, it was probably only a few years ago that I realised The Beatles was a punny name that would have seemed witty at first but got less funny each time people heard it.

It was right in front of my face and it never even clicked. 

Another thing that was right in front of my face was the microwave and how they all open on the same side. I say “right in front of my face” because often, when you’re using a microwave, you’re watching them so intensely it’s like you’re having a staring competition with them. 

If you’re facing a microwave, the door hinges will always be on your left. And the control panel will always be on your right. Have you ever noticed that? Or is that something that everyone just knows and accepts as the way things were meant to be?

Because it seems messed up to me. 

I mean, who decided that all microwaves were this way? Was it one appliance dictator who made this decree or is this a conspiracy all the appliance makers are in on? How come no microwave makers have the guts to go against their conformist competitors and open the other way? Who are these cowards?!

I had these thoughts while looking for a microwave to fill the microwave-shaped hole in my kitchen. 

And the microwave-shaped hole in my kitchen is hard to fill. Not because of the sixe of the void, but because of where the void is located. Unfortunately, the people who designed my kitchen those many moons ago put the microwave hole underneath an overhead cabinet so it hangs over the bench corner. You can’t stand directly in front of it, so you have to lean over the bench to get to it. And if you’re standing on the kitchen side of the bench, opening a microwave door that’s hinged on the left hand side means nearly slapping yourself in the face with said microwave door. 

So my plan was to get a microwave that opened the other way.

I don’t know if this is me showing my age, but I feel like there used to be a time when you should get microwaves with door hinges on the right hand side without much trouble. I like to think it was around the same time my place was built, otherwise those were either some very short-sighted or just downright spiteful cabinet makers. 

But it seems those golden days have passed. Because every microwave I’ve seen – and I’ve seen a lot in recent weeks – has the control panel on the right and the door hinges on the left. 

A little online research tells me what I already knew – those microwave norms were set because they suited the right-handed folk better. Opening the door with a left hand side hinge was more natural for right-handed people. And you’re much more successful at pressing the right buttons if you’re doing it with you dominant hand, so it makes sense that right-handed people felt more comfortable with the buttons being on the right-hand side.

And, look, I understand there are many more right-handed folk in the world and market forces meant the left-handed microwaves weren’t commercially viable, thus being the cause of the ceasing of their production and eventfully erasing their presence from society. Capitalism is anti-left. I get it. 

But I just really hate it when the world doesn’t cater specifically to my own individual needs and petty desires, you know?

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, June 16, 2021

It’s funny how some fleeting, inconsequential moments of television can stick with you for life. 

Back in the day, when free-to-air television was all we had and we were slaves to the whims of the program scheduling gods, a lot of channel flipping was going on. Rather than being barnacles on the couch binge-watching entire seasons of shows at a time, we were more athletic. And by that I mean, we went to the extreme effort of lifting up a remote, pointing it towards the television and using one finger to press a single button to flip through the stations.  

We didn’t have the digital menus explaining to us that we were in for back-to-back-to-back episodes of Escape to the Country. Unless we had the television guide from the paper, we were flying blind. Every new press of the button was a new opportunity. The channel-changing button was like the lever on a pokie machine (I’m still not entirely sure how they work, but the depictions of them in The Simpsons suggest there’s a lot of lever pulling going on there) and we were  pressing away, hoping to get the television equivalent of a one dollar coin jackpot equalling less than 47 per cent of what was originally put into the machine that afternoon.

I mean, sure, that still goes on these days because free-to-air television is far from dead, but I feel like – well for me any, anyway – the mindless and desperate channel flipping has now been replaced with mindless and desperate scrolling on smartphones.

Sometimes you’d get a wildly intriguing documentary you’d never plan on sitting down to watch but can’t tear your eyes away from, sometimes you’d get an infomercial on a revolutionary mop. You could come up with nothing or you could walk away with something life-changing; you just never knew until you pressed that button.  

It was all the thrill of the flip. 

I was thinking about this the other day, when I was having a spot of soup and came to the bottom of my bowl. I began to spoon up the remaining bits by slanting the bowl away from me and remembered I’d learned this dining habit from a chance encounter on television. It was some movie with a young Brendan Fraser in it. I can’t remember the plot but it was one of those movies in the 90s where rich people were still depicted as a Victorian-era kind of rich, whose lives were juxtaposed with a normal person’s, who was always bewildered by their fancy, fancy mannerisms. For some reason, a soup-eating scene stuck in my mind. The commoner scraped the dregs of their soup up like a normal person/uncultured beast, while the others daintily scooped up the remaining liquid with style and grace. While I’ve forgotten countless other items of useful information, this scene and what it says about soup eating stuck firmly in my brain. 

As I sat there at the table looking wistfully out the window, I began to list other fleeting television moments that I have carried with me these 29 years. Here’s just a few others from the top of my head:

“It’s a puppy”: This is a quote from another movie I never learned the title of. The line was said by a father who gave his son a large rat, assuring him that it was, indeed, a baby dog and not a disease-ridden rodent. I saw this with my curly-haired friend at least 15 years ago and it still comes up. It’s a great phrase to use when you’re trying to pretend that something is much better than it is, but you’re not really trying all that hard to convince anyone. 

“Staaaaay outta mah rooooom”: This was a quote I heard on some low-budget ABC kids show. It was a big sister telling off her little sister for being in her room, but the way she told her off was so bizarre (see the above misspelling for an idea of the pronunciation) that I had to tell my older sister about it. Twenty years later, she still says it to me. And she’d never even seen it herself. 

“Don’t overexert yourself!”: Another nameless movie, this time from the exceedingly crass 2000s teen movie era. It was uttered frantically by a friend of a boy who had been in coma for a year. But the warning came too late and the recently awoken friend had an explosive evacuation of his bowels. While we’re certain this isn’t entirely medially accurate, my sister and I do use that quote quite a bit.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, June 9, 2021

I recently* made quite a grim confession to a friend: I couldn’t remember the last time I went to the supermarket. 

* Yeah, look, when I wrote this back in June, that “recently” was accurate. But I have to point out that this was like two months ago so the accuracy of that “recently” is now up to you, because recentness is relative, when you think about it. I mean, if you define “recently” in terms of days or weeks, that “recently” is out of date. But if your definition of “recent” applies to anything that happened within this millennium and you’re using, say, the release of Lindsay Logan’s song Rumours as a time landmark, then I’m totally in the clear to refer to my confession as recent.

We were talking over the phone so I couldn’t see her face, but I heard it drop. And when you can hear someone’s face drop, it’s a pretty confronting indication that things aren’t good.

But, I mean, it’s not like I wasn’t eating. I was. 

The night before I’d visited two friends who just happened to be cooking up a hunk of rotisserie pork when I agreed to pop by. That day I’d eaten a bowl of the overpriced takeaway salad which was leftover from the lunchtime before. And I was planning on having boiled eggs on toast for dinner. 

I explained this to her, but my dinner plans prompted a groan that told me my testimony did little to mitigate her concerns.

“When was the last time you actually cooked something? Cooking’s fun, it always makes you feel good,” she said. 

I mean, technically boiling eggs IS cooking something, because the act of heating up eggs up falls under the vague definition of cooking. In essence, to cook something is to apply heat. Boiling the kettle is cooking water. Putting chicken tenders in the oven is cooking chicken. But I suppose there’s a bit of a difference between heating something up and cooking. 

So my concerned, mildly (and, I have to admit, justifiably) disgusted friend told me that, the following night, I had to go to the supermarket, get some ingredients and cook them up.

I decided to go with a Nigella Express recipe, which is from an era in Nigella Lawson’s life when she was very, very busy helping her daughter study for exams, meeting vague deadlines and medicating her friend with obscenely chocolatey bickies after a not-at-all fake breakup. She had very little time, but the same appetite. So she relied on a lot of shortcuts in the recipes in her book – using garlic-infused oil, snipping food with scissors instead of dirtying a chopping board and using fortified wine.  

I decided to try her Rapid Ragu and, because I was trying to impress, I planned on whipping up a quick garlicky white bean mash.

The ragu called for lentils and I just naturally assumed that meant a whole tin of lentils. It didn’t. It just needed a few tablespoons of dried lentils. But because I didn’t read the recipe properly I went ahead and ripped the lid off a can of lentils. And because you can’t put a lid back on a can once you rip it off, I was left with a full tin of lentils. 

I could have tipped them into a containers use later but, given my recent track record, I didn’t see myself using them for weeks and knew I’d end up eventually chucking them in the bin.

So I decided to go rogue. Instead of my white bean mash, I’d freewheel a lentil mash. It ended up being a questionable grunge, but I think it would be quite good with a final drizzle of olive oil with some warmed pita triangles. Here’s how to do what I did:

Step one: Say “f— it, I’m just gonna do it” to absolutely no one and whack a large frypan on the hotplate on a medium heat.

Step two: Tip in a good glug of garlic-infused olive oil, because you already spent far too much money on it and may as well use it.

Step three: Roughly chop the white bits at the end of four spring onions into chunks about the size of your pinkie toe (or about 2.5cm, in case you don’t want to put your foot up on the bench to measure said chunks against).

Step four: Fry the chunks in the oil until they get a little soft and a little brown. 

Step five: Decide to add a bit of a butter, ripping a thumb-sized chunk off the already whittled-down block of butter in the butter dish.

Step six: Once that’s melted and bubbling, tip the drained, burdensome lentils into the frypan, along with a dramatic splosh (yes, “splosh” is a standard unit of measurement) of boronia marsala, which is a sweet mediciney fortified wine I bought to go into the ragu and will probably only use for very late night, extremely unwise cocktail infusions. Turn the heat down slightly.

Step seven: Sprinkle in two pinches of salt and a few grinds of pepper.

Step eight: Once the lentils seem to have softened, mash them with the back of a spoon until you’re left with something that looks like cat vomit.

Step nine: Transfer to a bowl and marvel at how disgusting it looks. Stir through half a handful of finely-chopped parsley leaves.

Step 10: Eat with a spoon and wonder if what you’re eating is actually really good or if you’re just really good at convincing yourself it’s really good.