Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Do you remember how great summer holidays were as a kid? A seemingly endless expanse of time when the daily routine of school-homework-weekends was suspended in a glut of play. I don’t remember the specifics of summer holidays but I do remember the rhythms. Cricket, of course […]
“Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” – from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Over a decade ago now I spent some months in Colombia. I travelled from Ecuador up through the green coffee-clad mountains to the […]
Love, we’re going home now, Where the vines clamber over the trellis… – from ‘Love, We’re Going Home Now’, Pablo Neruda The week that we moved down to Melbourne was chaos. The afternoon we picked up the keys to our new house it was pouring with rain. The kids were going stir-crazy and the removalists […]
Designers want me to dress like Spring, in billowing things. I don’t feel like Spring. I feel like a warm red Autumn.” – Marilyn Monroe Apologies for the radio silence, but I have a good excuse. We’ve just moved – both house and state – with all of the chaos that entails. After almost six […]
“On the vines the grapes hung in tiny clusters, freckled and warm.” – from My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell I’ve read My Family and Other Animals countless times. Durrell’s funny and exuberant memoir of his childhood on Corfu is resplendent with lush descriptions of places, of people, of animals, and of food. […]
The crazy vegetables Uncurled Their tendrills and leaf-crowns, Throbbing bulbs, In the sub-soil The carrot With its red mustaches Was sleeping… From ‘Ode To The Artichoke’ by Pable Neruda Pablo Neruda was one of the first poets that I learned to love, and one that I still love to this day. I have several of […]
In these days of food blogs and online savvy, I’m relatively picky when it comes to buying cookbooks. I have a few on the shelf that I refer to time and again and though I’m always flipping through the glossy pages of cookbooks at the book shop it’s only rarely that I’ll purchase a new […]
I woke up today and, just like that, it is spring. The air has lost its chill, the first of the jasmine is in bloom, the sky is the clearest highest dreamiest blue. A glossy fat lizard is sun-baking in our neighbour’s front garden, birds are singing on a wire, and I’m walking around in […]
It’s Monday night. The weekend just past was a busy one. I spent all of Saturday out at Beaudesert for work, getting home in time for dinner, showers, storytime with the kids, then bed. Sunday flew past as Sundays are wont to do and suddenly it was the start of a new week. It was […]
It’s been threatening to rain for a few weeks now, and this weekend it finally did. Not quite soon enough though; most of South-East Queensland is now officially in drought. After our first summer up in Brisbane almost four years ago, where it rained relentlessly for months on end, where everything was mildewed and floods […]
