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.

Originally published The Clifton Courier, May 26, 2021

I recently read a column from a TV chef called Adam Liaw about how annoying it was that those “nostalgic comfort foods” we see popping up at restaurants and on cooking shows are very, very American – think mac and cheese. 

His argument was that, while these dishes were undoubtedly delicious, they weren’t the actual food of our dinky di Australian childhoods. I typically agree with most things this guy comes out with, making him my second favourite person to follow on Twitter – behind the official Twitter account for Paddington Bear. And aside from the point he made a while back that you absolutely can bake with salted butter, this is the point I perhaps agree with the most vehemently. 

Because while whether or not you can miss something you never had in the first place is an argument best had over a bottle of wine instead of in this column, I’m going to go ahead and say that you can’t long for the food of your childhood if you didn’t actually eat that food as a child. 

When I think of the ultimate comfort food of my childhood, there’s really only one dish that cuts the mustard (I mean, there’s also the Maggi Two Minute Chicken Noodle sandwich on white bread with lots of butter, but that’s not really a recipe, that’s a lifestyle choice).  

It’s Tiger Toast.  

Tiger Toast sounds very simple – Vegemite on toast with strips of Bega cheese grilled into it – and that’s the beauty of it.  

It’s something I remember Mum making for us when she didn’t have the time or the energy to cook. And that was pretty rare, actually. So if Mum wasn’t cooking us dinner, it was because something was either wrong or very out of the ordinary.  

I’m not sure how accurately my memory serves me, but I recall it being something we’d eat while Dad was working away. But we’d only really ever have Tiger Toast for tea – we didn’t call the evening meal “dinner” back then – when someone was sick or we’d arrived home late.  

When it was just us girls, there was a distinct Little Women (I’m talking the 1994 version with Winona Rider and Susan Sarandon, not that newfangled one with the open ending and all those colours) vibe in the house. I mean, we were discussing the plot of Home and Away instead the ideas of German philosophers and Father wasn’t out fighting in the Civil War, he was laying powerlines, but the vibe was there. We were more cooperative and kinder to each other and there was this overwhelming feeling of cosiness. 

It felt like it was us against the world, but with some white bread, Bega cheese and yeast spread, Mum made us feel like everything was going to be OK. And there was a novelty to having something like Tiger Toast for tea, like it was a little treat for our special little club.  

So when I’m in need, Tiger Toast gives me that wearing-pyjamas-warmed-by-the-fireplace kind of feeling. It’s also a great food for when it’s cold outside, you’ve got no one to impress and you’re feeling lazy.  

I… I’ve made it more than a few times lately.  

Here’s how I did it the other night: 

Step one: You have to pre-toast the toast, which I suppose means you could also call this thrice-cooked bread. I mean, you could just toast it once, but you want a bit of crunch here to offset the sogginess of melted cheese. If I was going for complete accuracy, I’d go with white bread. But because I’m a fancy grown up, I’m going with a slightly more gourmet brown bread. I feel like something crusty and sourdough-y would be good too, but I’m not fancy enough to have that just laying around the house. 

Step two: While I wait for the bread to toast – it’s currently just bread; it doesn’t become toast until it’s toasted – I open a 380 gram jar of Vegemite*. It’s brand new. There’s a smooth top, which I obviously pat gently with the pad of my finger because I’m only human.  

* It will probably be with me for life, because it’s quite a large jar and I’m sorry for sounding unAustralian, but in circumstances that don’t call for Tiger Toast, I’m actually more of a Promite person. It’s sweeter and often easier to spread. The good thing about either spread is that they don’t age. I mean, sure, there’s probably an expiry date, but that’s just arbitrary. A jar of Vegemite will outlast me and the children of the children I’m worried that I might never have. It’s got staying power.

Step three: Now the bread has transformed into toast, I smear some butter on it. Now, I suppose you don’t really need butter as there’s going to be plenty of cheese later, however, I will also remind you that this is a comfort food. Butter is essential.  

Step four: Time for the Vegemite. This is one of those times when it’s actually appropriate to entirely cover the bread in Vegemite. However, we’re not animals, so keep it to a thin coating. I mean, don’t go smearing on it like it’s Nutella.  

Step five: I’d planned to use Bega cheese for this, but the hunk I’d left in the fridge thinking “you know what, you’re probably going to need a little comfort Bega, better hang on to that” had gone completely mouldy so I had to chuck that out. Luckily, have multiple other types of cheese in the fridge as any resourceful woman in the dying months of her 20s would. I grab some Red Leicester cheese I’d bought a while back but never ended up opening. However, the use by date suggests it’s still very, very safe, so it’s going on. And this is a little oranger than the Bega stuff, so it’s more tiger-like, aesthetically speaking. I slice it into thin strips and lay them on the bread.  

Step six: I’m still pretty unfamiliar with my oven, so I crank it up to the hottest temperature and put it on the grill function. Then I leave the bread underneath the glowing red element for about five minutes, checking to hear that sweet, sweet sound of melted cheese bubbling.  

Step seven: I pull it out of the oven and see the stripes of Red Leicester have completely lost their form and decide this Tiger Toast should be called Lion Toast instead while I sit on my couch and watch reruns of a show I’ve seen many, many times before. Comfort food at its finest. 

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, April 28, 2021

I recently had to relocate my kitchen bin and it’s really not working for me. 

My bin or, as Mum refers to it, kitchen tidy, used to live in the gap between the wall and the fridge, but due to life being the unpredictable, shifty bastard that it is, that all changed last week. 

The fridge that previously chilled my milk, kept my frozen mango chunks frozen and hosted my many novelty tourist magnets (which not only serve the very practical purpose of sticking important papers to my fridge, they also inform visitors to my home that I’m worldly enough to have been to a bunch of different places, but still trashy enough to buy tacky fridge magnets) had to go. 

But thanks to the guttural-sob-inducing kindness of a friend, her parents and her grandmother who no longer needed three fridges, a replacement appliance was soon shunted into the void. 

And void is the right word. Because I’m living in a townhouse, space is a little… strategic. The kitchen shares a wall with the stairs and rather than just turning the space under the stairs into a cupboard for an orphaned wizard to live in, the designers of this townhome decided to use the gap as a dedicated fridge space. The old fridge was narrow enough to leave a space between the wall which was big enough for the bin. 

But this new fridge is a wide set old girl and there’s just not enough room for the bin. 

Again, the kitchen’s dimensions are… strategic, which means there’s no floorspace for the bin. 

And not that I want to pass judgement on anyone’s lifestyle, but I just can’t get around the whole bin-in-the-cupboard thing. There’s nothing legally wrong with keeping a bin in a cupboard; that’s a choice everyone has the freedom to make for themselves. It’s just the wrong choice for me, as I’m not a monster. 

So, with a lack of bin-appropriate real estate, I’ve moved said kitchen tidy/crud keeper/trash taker into the laundry for now. The laundry is just off the kitchen and, given the specific dimensions of my place, it’s quite a short commute from A to B. As the crow flies, it’s probably four steps from the kitchen to the laundry. But, again with those specific dimensions, there’s an angular kitchen bench that gets in the way, adding probably three steps to the journey.

Of course, seven isn’t a lot of steps. And it’s not like I have to go outside, step over puddles, dodge cane toads or brave icy temperatures and pouring rain to get to where I’m needing to go. I’m not trekking through Middle-earth to dump my garbage. 

It’s literally right there. 

But within the first few hours of the bin’s relocation I became a weary traveller. The journey seemed more and more arduous each time I embarked on it. Like, I had to stop what I was doing in the kitchen, turn my body towards the laundry, take a few steps, successfully navigate around the spit that is my kitchen bench, open the laundry door, put the rubbish in the bin and then retrace my steps. 

It’s kind of like when I’m doing something on the computer and I use a keyboard shortcut in a bid to avoid going to all the extra effort of lifting one of my hands a few centimetres until it reaches the mouse, manoeuvring the cursor and then returning the same travel-worn hand to the keyboard. 

I know that’s lazy. In fact, that’s the laziest thing I’ve ever heard. And I’m disgusted at myself. But I still go to extreme lengths to use only the keyboard, even when it takes more mental effort or uses up more time than using the mouse. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I can be a real piece of poo.

And I’m beginning to worry what the bin equivalent of a keyboard shortcut would look like: a plastic bin bag hanging on one of the kitchen cabinet door handles? A pile of rubbish in the sink? A bin in the cupboard?

Clearly I need to work on myself. 

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, April 21, 2021

I think I need to get a dying dog. 

I have always been someone who liked the idea of living alone. I like having my own space. I like being the authority on what is mess and what is an artful arrangement of items that portrays a homely, lived-in vibe. I like getting to decide what the appropriate volume is for each specific moment of a TV show (sometimes you need to crank it up when there’s a whispering scene and sometimes there’s an explosion that’s very, very loud – the volume setting needs to be adjusted accordingly).

I mean, I like knowing exactly how much milk is going to be left in the fridge at any given time. But I also like not being lonely. 

It’s nice having someone around when you get home. It’s nice having someone to talk to. It’s also very nice to know that if there’s a noise, it can be explained away on another living creature you’re on good terms with rather than the vengeful spirit of a young girl who died in a well in the 1800s but for some reason is directing her unholy anger towards you. 

It took me a while to learn this, but it turns people aren’t supposed to be alone and I, for one, would prefer not to be. 

Mum suggested getting a puppy the other day. 

It’s not a terrible idea. I do like dogs. You can give them long cuddles without it being weird. You can take them for walks. They love you for no reason, even when your undeserving soul is a bitter, withered prune. 

But there’s a few flaws in the puppy plan.

I work pretty unpredictable hours and puppies seem to need structure so they don’t turn into jerk dogs. I don’t think I have the discipline to train a puppy. And I’m not really a fan of all night barking, which is something I anticipate I would deal with as a careless puppy educator. 

Plus, I’m a strict outdoor dog kind of person. I get a little allergy-y when I’m around dogs and I don’t want their fur in my carpet, on my couch or blowing around in the hallways of my lungs. I also don’t want my house to smell of dog. And my backyard isn’t an ideal space for an energetic puppy with its whole life in front of it. 

I also don’t think I can commit to a decade with a dog. I’m not sure where I’ll be in 10 years’ time. I don’t know if I’ll have to move cities or go interstate or have to live on an abandoned oilrig in the middle of the stormy ocean.  

And another thing: I don’t want a needy dog, you know? Like, puppies tend to love people too hard. They cry when you leave for the day and follow you around all the time. It’s a too bit clingy for me. I don’t want a dog who’s so obsessed with me that it has to come with me to everything. I also don’t want to become too dependent on it in return and drag it to every brunch, brewery visit or beach trip I go on. Like, I don’t want having a dog to become my entire personality – I already have a fully-formed/mutated personality, thank you very much. 

What I need is a dog who’s cool with spending most of their time lazing around in my tiny yard, but is also happy to go out for a stroll on a golden afternoon. I need a dog who is too lazy to bark at possums. And, most importantly, I need a dog who loves me deep down, but has its own thing going on and gives me sassy side-eye when I’m being ridiculous. 

What I need is an old dog, preferably in the last year or two of its life. These are the kind of shelter dogs no one wants so they’ll be cheaper, and I’ll seem like a nicer person because I’m “selflessly” giving an unwanted dog a loving home. It’s a win-win. 

Of course, there is the issue of the dog eventually actually dying and the certainty of the hole that I tried to fill with an elderly canine widening even further when the inevitable occurs. 

But let’s just cross that bridge when we get to it.  

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, April 14, 2021

I had some friends stopping by the other week. They were doing that classic interstate weekender thing: squeezing in as many visits with as many people as possible in the space of 48 hours. I’d managed to snag a morning tea slot while they were getting the car they’d borrowed from a friend detail cleaned as a thankyou for the loan.

I had planned on taking them to a nearby café, but that morning it was announced that Brisbane was going into another snap lockdown, so I thought I’d offer them sanctuary in the COVID-free confines of my townhouse. 

And because all I had on hand to offer guests was a bowl of sultana and bran-based cereal, I thought I’d best whip up a batch of scones.

Here’s how that went down:

Now, while I’d like to one day be able to freewheel scones like some kind of master host (this fantasy also involves an impossibly expensive linen apron, tasteful mid-century furniture and a kitchen with triple glazed glass walls that overlook a stunning wilderness view), I’m still at the stage of needing to look up free recipes online. 

The one I saw on Taste.com called for three cups of self-raising flour. Now, number one, after what I’d witnessed in lockdowns past, flour became a hot commodity so I wanted to preserve what I had. I also knew that two men and I would never eat three cups-of-self-raising-flour worth of scones that morning and I didn’t want to be in the house alone with that many scones for three days. 

So I divvied it up by three. 

I took one cup of self-raising flour and sifted it into a bowl. The recipe said 80 grams of butter, but I was dividing it by thirds, so naturally I added 50 grams of butter, which I had chopped into cubes (which is perhaps the most calming, therapeutic sound one can hear).

Then I added a pinch of sea salt flakes and realised the only jam I had in the house was apricot jam. And, look, I’m not knocking apricot jam – in fact, I’m going to endeavour to do apricot jam on a scone – but we all know that scones are the stages upon which strawberry jam shines. I also didn’t have the time to whip any cream. 

But what I did have was fancy salted butter. 

So I decided to go off road – just a bit – to come up with a scone that only needed butter. I had come into a surplus of lemons and had recently bought a whizbang zester, so I grabbed a lemon* and grated the rind into the flour. I also had two bunches of thyme in the fridge – one that was freshly bought for roast-related purposes, the other was from a few weeks back and had started to dry out. I guess you could say I had… too much thyme on my hands. So I pulled the leaves off about eight springs of dry thyme and dumped them hastily into the bowl. I also added three tablespoons of raw sugar, because I felt like this needed a bit of sweetening and the molasses-y dark brown sugar I use for pretty much everything else things inappropriate on this rare occasion. Then I used my fingers to rub the mix into the butter and then added about a third of a cup of milk to the mix and tried to convince a dough to form.  

* This is far from an original thought, but do want to really emphasise how much lemons make almost everything. I feel like lemon should be on the table with the salt and pepper shakers. It’s the third seasoning and deserves to be revered like a holy entity.

It was a little too runny still, so I added a few extra tablespoons of self-raising flour and managed get it into something that could clump together somewhat cohesively. 

Time became increasingly of the essence, so I didn’t roll the dough out – I just kinda smooshed it so it was vaguely flat. Then I used a champagne flute to cut the dough into small circles and put them in a moderate oven for five minutes, with the intention of checking them and then adding a few extra minutes to the clock.  

It was right about the time the alarm went off when I realised I was supposed to pick my friends up. So I turned off the oven as I rushed out and hoped the residual heat would be enough to finish off the scones without burning their little bottoms. 

When I returned home, the smell of lemony calm wafted throughout the house and the scones had cooked through. They were slightly crumbly, but because they were served on a chunky wooden chopping board, it looked homely and rustic. 

If you’re going to make this at home, serve them still warm with amble salted butter.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, March 31

There’s been an Easter egg sitting on my bench for days. 

Well, it’s not actually an egg – it’s shaped like a bunny. But the term “Easter egg” is kind of like a catch-all way to describe all foil-wrapped novelty-shaped chocolate confections that are produced to be distributed on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, juuuust after the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere (you can see that “Easter egg” gets to the point quicker). 

It’s one of the fancier kinds of Easter bunnies. I mean, it’s still one you can get at the supermarket, but it’s the fanciest one you can get at the supermarket. It’s good quality chocolate, so it’s the kind of Easter egg that isn’t all about the presentation, how ever fabulous it is. There’s substance underneath all the bells and golden foil. In short, it’s a good egg. 

Anyway, I bought the egg as a little treat while on a grocery run the other day. My thinking was that it would be a treat separate to dessert. I mean, it’s not that we’re having dessert every night. That’s a little too much for someone who has never had a fast metabolism, which has somehow slowed even further after the “young” from her “young adult” dropped away like a blackened umbilical chord finally breaks off from a newborn’s belly button. 

I guess I was thinking the egg would be enjoyed as something that’s not just mindless eating – something to sit down and savour. It wasn’t something to just go mung ravenously on after a full day at work in that hour of madness where you end up eating literally anything you can gets your hands on and not even realise what you’re doing until you come out of the frenzy and find yourself standing in the hallway, your face slathered in apricot jam. It wasn’t something to be eaten while standing at the fridge door while searching desperately for something else to eat. It’s not as special.

And because it’s a bunny, this egg has eyes, foil ones, but eyes nonetheless. I can feel them bore into me when I consider just scoffing it down. They give me a look that says “really, mate, you’re just going to eat a whole Easter bunny within the space of 10 minutes at 12.27pm, fall asleep on the couch and spend the rest of the day in a cloud of regret?!”.

No, this egg was to be a conscious pleasure, enjoyed slowly when the time was right, I thought. 

But when is the right time, really?

It feels like I should be wait until it’s after dark with a candle burning and while wearing some fancy loungeware (that’s different to pyjamas – loungewear is the stylish comfortable gear you get around the house in when you want to feel like a luxe homebody; pyjamas are the stained, oversized t-shirts or undies you wear when you go bed and actually want to be comfortable enough to sleep). 

But by the time you’ve set everything up, that initial craving has had time to dull. It’s not sure much that you don’t want it anymore – it’s good chocolate, if course you want it! – but that genuine feeling of “yeah, you know what, I really feel like little bit of chocolate” is gone and you’re almost forcing it. It’s still nice, but it doesn’t hit the same.

And, again, those metallic eyes look at me saying “righto, so you need to plan a whole production just to enjoy some chocolate? Live your life for heaven’s sake!”

The problem is that I’m so regimented about the way I spend my days. The shift work I do dictates that I have to be, otherwise my life would be in complete shambles instead of just the partially shambolic existence I proudly maintain. I plan out my meals in advance, I plot my exercise according to a gym timetable and the positioning of the sun when I finish work and I have to book in social encounters weeks in advance. I suppose it’s reasonable that I’m not in tune with what my body wants and that I quash spontaneity because my schedule means if I let my hunger, energy levels and whims dictate my activities, I’d not get anything done.   

But, at the same time, you can’t really schedule in a chocolate craving. It does sap the fun out of things. And you can’t keep waiting for the moment to be entirely right, otherwise the chocolate will go all white and powdery. 

So perhaps I should just go eat it now. 

…but it’s only 9.04am.

Yeah, look, obviously that was a while ago now. The egg in question was eaten but then replaced with another egg on my next trip to the supermarket. Said egg was still sitting in the kitchen until a few days ago, when I put it in the baking section of my pantry. The plan is to melt it down and use it in my next batch of bickies to take into work. I mean, I didn’t eat this one was for entirely different reasons than the frivolous struggle detailed above. To be perfectly hon hon, I haven’t been able to stomach much lately.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, March 24, 2021

Yeah, look, it’s been a long time between drinks and there’s no illustrations, but don’t go givin’ me any grief, ya hear? I’ve had a bloody gutfull of your attitude.

There’s a weird smell in my house.

I live in a little, tastefully decorated townhouse. It has a small lounge room after the entrance then, behind the stairs, is the kitchen and dining area. The lounge room is carpeted. It’s a dark grey carpet that looks reasonably new. There are no obvious stains. And the carpets – both upstairs and downstairs – were shampooed before I moved in. 

The townhouse – or, as I like to call it, townHOME – isn’t old, but it’s not young either. Kind of like me. I mean, it still stands upright and doesn’t have any major cracks or lines, but it’s not exactly as hip and with it as the new townhouses in the neighbourhood. 

When I checked it out before I moved in, I noticed a faint whiff. It’s difficult to describe. I smelt a bit stale, maybe. Like it needed airing out and a good wipe down. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen, which is perhaps where the age of the place is most evident. It’s the neck of the house, if you will.

The laminate is separating from the chipboard in parts, particularly near the sink. The shelving lining had worn away and had been sealed by some, I have to admit, expertly applied duct tape. And the person who was in before me left a few things behind. Some of them, like bin bags, light bulbs and toilet paper – in this economy?! – were extremely helpful. But there were a few drawers and cupboards that clearly weren’t emptied and wiped out when old mate left. So I figured that once I gave everything a deep clean, I’d be right.

Once I moved in made sure everything was clean. I opened windows. I lit scented candles. 

Occasionally I’d get a faint whiff of that stale smell, but it wasn’t often. And when I asked guests about it, they didn’t notice it. 

Eventually, the smells my life overpowered the pre-existing pong.  

But then the other day I got home from work and was slapped in the face by said odour, which had intensified during its absence. It wasn’t faint. It wasn’t a slight whiff. It was a solid cloud of stench. 

If I were to describe it, I would probably say it was a mixture between sweaty old gym socks that had dried out in the sun and that dank belly button smell (you know the smell, I know the smell, let’s not go pretending we’re something that we’re not). Sometimes, I swear it also has a faint hint of diesel. 

And I can’t for the life of me work out the source of it. 

I sniffed long and hard like a witch from Hocus Pocus who had detected the presence a child. After much nasal inhaling, I had narrowed the stench to part of the lounge room near the stairs. I had a general idea of where the smell was located but not where it was coming from. 

I took all the cushions from the couch, hoping to find a dank sock wedged in there. But, alas, there was none. I stood on the couch sniffing the ceiling thinking there could be a rotting rodent corpse between the floors, but it didn’t smell stronger up there. None of the plants in the room were dying to the point of giving off the smell of decay (but I think they’ve accepted their fate, it’s really only a matter of time for some of them). I sniffed the walls but detected nothing. I even got down and started sniffing the carpet like a dog tracking a criminal, but no mystery puddle of pong was detected. 

There’s no obvious source for this smell that no one else seems to notice. 

This means two things: that there’s a supernatural force in the house trying to drive me mad by producing mystery smells that no one else can smell or there’s something afoot deeper than the surface level that requires skilled tradespeople to address.  

And for either of these two scenarios, the solution is the same: lighting a scented candle as a calming distraction to the problem and pretending that nothing is wrong. I think we can all agree that this is the best way to deal with any problem, right?

Right, so I’m thinking there’s probably a sink/drainage issue that needs to be addressed with some corrosive chemicals. Of course, I’m yet to address this problem as I keep forgetting to pick up the gear when I duck out to the shops.

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, March 3, 2021

I think I’m on the verge of a breakfast-based philosophical epiphany. 

I was eating breakfast the other day and rather than going for my regular spinach and eggs combo, I had myself a bowl of cereal. The type of cereal is integral to this little rant I’m about to unleash on you, but I don’t want to go ahead and name brands.

I don’t want to make it look like I’ve been bought off by Big Bran to say nice things about this type of cereal. I also don’t want to be accused of being paid off by this particular cereal’s competitors to say bad things about it, even though I must say it would bring my great joy to think of rival cereal makers laying aside their differences to join forces and form a secret cereal cartel to take down the big guy via advertorial disguised as trivial opinion pieces in regional independent newspapers. That would be most amusing (and, just in case the editor – who I like to refer to as the TEDitor because I’m clearly hilarious – is reading this, I’d tell them to book an ad instead).

So, I’ll just say that I’m referring to a cereal that comprises of bran flakes and dried grapes. 

Now, I love dried grapes or, as they’re more commonly known as, sultanas. I have a long history of adding them to things that others may raise an eyebrow at. Cornflakes. Rice Bubbles. Coco Pops. All of these cereals are greatly improved taste-wise by a handful of sultanas. And while I sometimes poke fun at my mother’s early 90s version of “stir fry” – being beef mince with grated carrot and zucchini severed on a bed of Magi two-minute chicken noodles – I have to tell you that the sultanas she added this concoction really lifted the whole dish. In more recent times, I’ve been known to add sultanas to rices dishes and drool over a sultana-studded couscous.

I love sultanas.

And I particularly love the sultanas in this type of cereal. They just taste so good. I’m not sure exactly why, but I like to imagine it’s because they’ve been roughed up and laced with bran in the cereal-mixing process, rather than some kind of artificial chemical-based procedure.

So when I don’t get enough of them, I’m disappointed. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m partial to a bit of bran on its own – because I’m just that exciting of a person – but the addition of sultanas to the mix really makes those fibre flakes sing. I don’t want to be rude to bran, but it is rather bland. It’s boring. And while we all know that bran is a large part of the cereal, I don’t think nearly as many people would be eating it if it weren’t for the sultanas.

But you can have too many sultanas, I’ve learned. 

You start off being like “oh boy oh boy, look at all them sweet, sweet sultanas in my bowl, it’s my lucky day”. But after the first few mouthfuls, it’s too sweet. It’s sickly. It’s too gunge-y in your gob. You begin to miss – nay, yearn for – the bran.

Like the Spice Girls famously sung, too much of something is bad enough. And when you’ve got like five sultanas to spoonful of bran, it’s not great. Of course, you’ve got to have a bit of perspective – if the worst thing that happens to you all day is that you had too many sultanas in your bran, you’re going alright. But it makes for an unpleasant bowl.

It’s just like when you don’t get enough sultanas because, as the Spice Girls also sung, too much of nothing is just as tough. And this often happens within those first few bowls from a fresh box. You get mostly bran as the sultanas are cruelly taken by gravity to the bottom of the box. Maybe you’ll get a couple of sultanas here and there, but it’s not nearly enough. You feel ripped off. You feel like you have to start rationing sultanas, strategically selecting them for each spoonful. You can’t just blindly dig in your spoon without paying attention because you might eat your entire allocation of sultanas in one mouthful and be doomed to finish off a bowl of sultana-less bran.

My friends, it’s all about ratio. You need the sultanas to make the bran interesting. But you’ve got to have those bland fibre flakes to offset the sweetness of the sultanas. It’s a delicate balance. 

It sounds like there’s some kind of life lesson in this. I mean, there’s always a life lesson in something if you look hard enough. But if you look too long, your bran will go soggy and you’ll be left with a bowl of slop.   

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, February 24, 2020

I’ve never been big into tennis. 

Tennis was one of those sports that required you to show some degree of athleticism, which wasn’t really my jam as a youngster. So I never took to the courts. 

And I grew up in quite a strict rugby league household. Footy – which is to say, the NRL, not Union or that scrappy AFL business – was the only sport that was ever played on our green-tinged television (back in the day we had this big old TV which had a dome-like glass screen encased in a chipboard box with a classy wood-look vinyl finish. We had no idea how green the screen was until people came over and informed us we were watching the world through green-tinted lenses).

Tennis never got a look in. 

So I’ve never had an in-depth grasp of the mechanics of the game. I mean, sure, I knew it involved a net, a ball and a whole bunch of groaning, but that was kind of it. 

Last year I went to a friendly tennis competition, which is to say a friend had a bunch of us around for beers and a barbecue at his family property, which had an old tennis court out the back. There were enough of us there to play in pairs, which, for those of you playing along at home, is also called “doubles”. 

I didn’t know how to play tennis exactly, but I had a rough idea of how to hit a ball with a blunt object. I’d played softball (not well, mind you). I’d held my own at handball back in the day. And, most importantly, loved that scene on Parent Trap where one of the iterations of Lindsay Lohan says “I’ll take a whack at it”. I was willing to have a whack at it.

What we ended up playing was something I dubbed “keep it live”, which was a hybrid of tennis, volleyball and that game you used to play as a kid when you had a balloon that, under no circumstances, was allowed to touch the floor. 

Basically, you had to keep the ball in motion, even if that meant hitting it a few times on your side of the net. There were no points, but you were the loser if you failed to keep the ball bouncing. This approach to the game made for some dramatic, desperate hits that were fun to watch and participate in. 

In my highly educated opinion, it’s much more enjoyable than the regular way of playing the game. In most circumstances, I’d recommend it over the current, strictly regimented game. This version is much, much cooler.

For example, this… more organic form of the game is well suited to family barbecues and Sunday seshes. But I understand that there are more formal tournaments out there that call for more structured play.

I suppose the Australian Open is one such tournament.   

Like, I can only imagine the online bickering that would erupt if the rules were loosened just a bit. And I’m not saying that tennis isn’t great to watch, but while watching the finals the other night, it occurred to me that the addition of a few new rules would make for even more interesting viewing. I made these observations to my couch doubles partner, but the reception wasn’t as warm as I was hoping for – except for one suggestion. I mean, said couch doubles partner hates the idea of Keep It Live and is a real stickler for the rules on the court, so I suppose it’s it no big surprise that my ideas were shot down. But, look, you can be the judge – here are my humble suggestions: 

Play on: I know that when the ball bounces out of the square, it’s out. But I reckon there should be a rule where, if someone plays the ball after it goes out, they should lose the point unless they shout “play on!” before the ball comes into contact with their racquet. Just like handball. It keeps both players on their toes. It means they have to ready to call out their opponent. 

Net rebounds: I don’t think that nipping the net should be the end of it. Not if you’re hungry enough. Not if you want it that badly. Not if you’re willing to go in and keep it alive. If it hits the net but you’re able to play at it, rebound style, then it should be play on. 

One racquet per game: If you smash your racquet in a fit of rage, you have to keep playing with it. This was the rule that got the nod of approval. Reckon I’ve got a shot at getting it accepted at an international tournament level?