My Dinner with Carol, Julie, Lyn and Hannah - or How a highly-paid attorney hijacked a pleasant evening

Four of the five of us have birthdays round about the same time, and over the last few years we have developed a lovely tradition of having dinner together some time in March, and also a couple of other times a year. We sometimes exchange tiny presents or drink a glass of champagne to celebrate a promotion, send someone on their travels or welcome someone home.

Last time we met we decided to plan a special event. Julie and I had both read a wonderful account of a vegetarian degustation menu at Jacques Reymond, a much-awarded restaurant, so we booked months in advance, and had this treat to look forward to.

We turned up on Thursday — the restaurant is in a beautiful and huge Victorian house, with high ceilings and perfect-sized rooms — and began our feast. Three of us went with the vegetarian menu; the other two went with the meat version. We began auspiciously with a light-as-air profiterole made with gruyère, and then began eight courses of perfectly balanced, delicate food. I am not a fan of over-fussy food, and at times this came close. There was rather a lot of foam, too, which doesn't thrill me at the best of times, though one serve of it, on one of the dishes, was absolutely divine. But I did really enjoy this meal. The service was excellent; the wine was good; and the vegetarian and meat courses somehow complemented each other perfectly, often just variations of each other. Here are a couple of photos: check out the truffle shavings over the egg-white omelette, and the gazpacho served in vegetable jelly rolls with buckwheat on top.

Conversation was going swimmingly: we laughed and chatted, and compared notes about our children, our work, our travels, our lives. Really, the food was amazing. We ate delicious things but didn't feel over-full, as the food was so light, with an emphasis on flavour and texture, rather than richness.

And then something happened that slowly began to unravel our happiness.

As we were waiting for the first of our two desserts, the waiter brought five small wine glasses to the table and starting to pour a late-picked riesling. Sometimes desserts do come with their own wine, but we asked, to make sure there had been no mistake. And we were told that two gentlemen sitting in the corner of the room had sent it over for us.

Well, what to do? None of us were really familiar with strangers buying us drinks in bars or restaurants before, so we were a little non-plussed. It was familiar to us only through the movies. In such a scene, what happens? You look around to the table and catch their eye and thank them. It was so clearly not a scene of seduction, so that didn't seem to be the issue. The waiter reported they had said it was a gentlemanly thing to do...

After what seemed a very long and uncomfortable time, but which was probably only a few minutes, I got up and went over to them. I certainly wasn't going to drink the wine without thanking them, and kind of wanted to close it all down. So I just said thank you very much, that they were very kind, and that we would enjoy the wine very much. I shook hands with them both, but didn't introduce myself, or ask why they had done it: I just wanted to close off the exchange.

But of course, that wasn't enough. One of the two men came over to our table later on and started to talk with us. There are a number of things I remember him saying: that he thought it was great that we were having dinner together; that he was gay; that he didn't eat sweets himself, and that he blamed his mother for that, because she had never let him eat sweets; that we should be doing something, as women, to support Julia Gillard; and that he was a highly-paid attorney. I guess he would be in his early forties.

This is where it really became difficult. We had drunk his wine, so couldn't be too rude, but Carol immediately picked him up on daring to give us his approval of eating without men at the table; and I said I thought it was really men who had the greater problem with Gillard, and who might have to work a bit harder.

On it went. And then off he went back to his table. But then he came over again, and said we had to give him six minutes before we paid our bill.

Now it was really getting awkward. Was it possible he was going to try and pay our bill? That would have been intolerable. So we didn't wait his six minutes, but finished our dessert, moved on to our tea and petits fours ...

... and then paid our bill, collected our coats, and left. As we were leaving, one of the waiters told Lyn the man was wanting to order another dessert for us, but that they had dissuaded him.

As we drove home (I'd driven straight from the airport, so had one glass of red, and just a taste of the reisling, so I drove us all back to the other side of the river, where such a thing would *never* happen!), we became angrier and angrier. It was a classic case of delayed reaction to sexual harassment, or in this case, the insidious attempt to patronise and disempower. Clearly the sight of five articulate women having dinner together is still an affront to some men. Blaming his mother, to a group of mothers in their fifties, was problematic enough, but it was so clearly a case of not knowing what to do with us, and not being able to leave us alone, either. So we could see what it was all about, and how foolish he was, but also how irritating it was that this "gentlemanly" behaviour was such a power play.

It's a tricky one, this one. Even the waiters struggled a little with how to manage us, and address us. I suppose the idea of the "ladies who lunch" sits behind this. We are supposed to giggle and flirt with the waiters, are we? and with the other guests? We weren't wearing suits and didn't look corporate enough to be forbidding? As we were leaving, the waiters presented us with tiny little white cardboard boxes which we weren't supposed to open till breakfast. So wicked, we didn't wait and in the car discovered there was one tiny rum ball in the box. Was this a token of restaurant apology for the unpleasantness? Was it the sense that a little more sugar would sweeten the evening?

I was exhausted by the time I got home. I'd been up early, gone to the hotel gym in Canberra and spent all day at a meeting, then flown back, and driven across the city before the dinner started. I was in bed by midnight, and in spite of my big meal, didn't feel I had over-eaten. And yet I barely slept, as the evening had kind of unravelled for me. The funniest thing, really, was his making sure we knew he was a "highly paid attorney" as it's a word that really isn't used in Australia. For us, it absolutely betrayed his own sense that he was acting out a scene from a movie.

Ridiculous. Irritating. Angry-making.

Queen of cities; queen of cheeses

If ever you were in doubt that Melbourne is the queen of cities, you need consider only this: it's possible to return from two weeks in Italy when you ate burrata mozzarella every second day, and were utterly ravished by its soft, creamy clouds and twists, then come home and on one day be offered fresh buffalo mozzarella at The European for lunch, but turn it down, because at home you have a tub of fresh burrata you bought the day before, at La Latteria, a "mozzarella laboratory", and milk, yoghurt and cheese shop that is literally on your way home. This place makes burrata and other varieties of mozzarella fresh daily on the premises in Carlton, from buffalo milk from Queensland and Mildura. I bought crumbed bocconcini, which we had last night, a tub of yoghurt cheese with chilli and mint, and a tub of two big balls of burrata. I can't wait to go back and try their cream; and their other cheeses. It's even tempting to think about buying milk there and recycling the bottles...

Paul is away tonight, and Joel is in Italy on his school trip (ahem), so I treated myself on my own: a big plate of fresh spinach, shaved avocado, a Roma tomato, salt, fresh pepper, green olive oil, and lemon juice. I then took the soft white ball of burrata — about the size of a cricket ball — out of its tub and sat it in the middle of the plate. It sat there, gleaming, wet, and shimmering. Then mustering my courage, I poked at it with the tip of my knife, and as the woman in the shop promised, the soft creamy insides spilled out, and I lifted off the outside skin. And the finishing touch? The balsamic glaze, which I used to write crazy scripts of sweet, dark caramel lines and hieroglyphs across the plate. I took myself off to the couch, and demolished the lot. It was just as well no one was there to see me eat this: it would not have been a very edifying sight.

But I'm sure it's on the strength of this feast that I wrote two brilliant sentences of Chapter Seven tonight.

Marvellous Florence

After the Chaucer congress I'm taking another two days' holiday, and have just returned to Rome from Florence. The first night, Jeffrey and I arrived around 5, checked in, then regrouped at 7.00. Our hotel was gorgeous; and I lucked out with an enormous and serene room on the third floor and my own little balcony looking down into the courtyard and its terracotta rooftiles.

Armed with a map, and about twenty recommendations for restaurants, we found our way to the Mozzarella bar I remembered from September, in the pillared courtyard of an old bank. We started with a glass of prosecco and a liberal serve of antipasti. Mozzarella was promised, but never appeared on the self-service bar, so we had another look at the menu and ordered up a degustazione of five different mozzarelle, on a huge platter of greens and cherry tomatoes. They ranged from delicate to smoked, and there was also a ricotta style. But the highlight was a bowl of creamy mozzarella burrata, which I have discovered is my favourite thing to eat in the whole world. I ate it in Siena (and am waiting for Tom's photo), and it is creamy, with a tendency to form slight threads — I've seen it described as stracciatella, too. It is so soft they pile it on the plate, where it looks like a meringue about to go into the oven, or into a bowl, or even twist a little knot into the top. Sigh. Such sweet creamy goodness.

This was supposed to be a pre-dinner treat, but we were unable to contemplate eating any more, so we just walked and walked, across the Arno, along its banks, then back across the Ponte Vecchio. During the day, it just looks like a bunch of jewelery shops: at night, it's clear that they are more like little market stands, though locked up with ancient wooden panels and heavy black metal clasps: an odd mix of transient and secure. The half-moon shone over the water, as we found our way to the Palazzo Vecchio. Curiously it was open, so we wandered through its vast hall and endless suites of rooms upstairs, out into upstairs loggias with wonderful views of the city and beautiful breezes. Many of the rooms had their windows open - perhaps to clear out the air after the day's heavy traffic - and there was hardly anyone there. We found the little studiolo where Machiavelli used to work; and marvelled at the choice of the rape of the Sabine women as decoration for the rooms for the Medici's waiting women.

Emerging into the piazza della signoria, it was time for a midnight gelati: I had amaretto and pink grapefruit.

Well, you know: we work pretty hard. It was good to have a holiday. And there was more to come the next day. But that's for another post.

Eating in Public: a series of occasional vignettes

At Barkly Square (a pretty ordinary shopping mall in Brunswick: no nightingales here), I walked past the big glass windows of the little food court. Sitting up at the bar facing the windows (with the fish and chips, the "asian" food, the turkish bar, the hamburger joint and the roast chicken bar behind him) was a man with a big spoon, demolishing with gusto a large half of watermelon. Its lurid pink and green looked cartoonish against the quotidian drabness of his surroundings.

In April last year, I blogged about a woman eating cheerios in Philadelphia. Are two examples enough to constitute a series?

Food, Glorious

As predicted, a tremendous storm hit Melbourne early into our party. Undaunted, the musicians played on; the revellers kept revelling; and the little old cat Mima came inside and sprawled flat out in the middle of the area where people were serving themselves dinner from the buffet table. A shame it was really too wet to be outside for much of the evening, but so lovely, in many cases, to see people we hadn't seen for a while. The teenagers went out into the rain, of course, and came in soaked to the skin. The children explored the house (it's a mixture of very old and run-down; and architect-clever ingenious spaces), and carried the cat around a bit. For all her great age, she quite likes a party, ever since Pavlov's Cat let her play with her Christmas earrings when she was a baby. People brought food, wine, and friends; we cooked up a storm; and at one point I went around opening as many windows as I could, to let the cool air in. People drifted over to the sink, and washed or dried a load of dishes. At midnight, we lit sparklers and ate lollies.

Paul's parents were fabulous, as usual: washing dishes, and going around talking to as many people as they could. Our dear friends and neighbours, whose boys were part of the band, stayed on cleaning up and helping us with the preliminary party de-brief, but by 2.30 we were in bed. One of the girls' parents (obviously a younger generation than ours) didn't come to pick her up till after that... Joel had a few other friends stay over.

We woke late — bliss! — and did a bit more cleaning up, before Paul grilled some scallops with bocconcini, haloumi and grilled peppers, which we washed down with a wonderful Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc someone had brought along (thank you!), before we found some enormous creamy oysters in the back of the fridge that also needed to be eaten today. And the tira-mi-su was possibly even better, two days after making. During this late luxurious lunch, Mima appeared: she'd had the longest sleep-in of all of us. After all that, I am going to head out for a big ride on the bike soon...

But in the meantime, as per Meredith's request, Oyster Pies. This is a recipe from Maggie Beer that appeared in the Australian in September 2000. I cut the page out, and periodically lose and find it again. The pastry is wonderful: easy to make; very delicate but good to handle, as you can roll it reasonably thick, and it still becomes very light and buttery to eat.

Leek and Oyster Pies - my annotations in red

12 young leeks, cleaned, cut into 5 mm slices (but I've also used onions)
butter
sea salt & freshly ground butter
125 ml champagne (but who's going to measure that? I've also used a dry white)
100 ml cream & an extra dash of cream
30 large Pacific oysters - this means big fat creamy Tasmanian ones, I reckon, not Sydney rocks oysters.
1 egg

Sour Cream Pastry

200 g chilled unsalted butter, diced small
250 g plain flour
125 ml sour cream

Pastry: process butter and flour until mix resembles breadcrumbs. Add sour cream and pulse until the dough has just incorporated into a ball. Wrap in plastic film and rest in the fridge for 20 minutes. Roll out dough and line moulds, then cut out lids slightly larger than moulds. Chill for 20 minutes.

I have a tray of 24 little moulds with straight sides,  3-4 cm in diameter? definitely worth the investment: great for mini-muffins, etc. 

Sweat leeks in butter until soft, then season. Deglaze the pan with champagne and reduce the liquor. Add 100 ml cream and reduce a little more. Allow to cool. Chop oysters in halves or thirds. Put a spoonful of leek mix into each pie mould, then add oyster and cover with a little leek. Position lids and seal carefully (I use the beaten egg for this, but also pinch the pastry, and make sure the lid doesn't stick to the mould anywhere: otherwise the lids will come off when you take them out). Chill for 20 minutes. Preheat oven to 220 degrees C. Beat egg and add the extra cream, then brush over pie lids. Cook pies until golden, about 15 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes in the tin before turning out and serving. Makes 30.

Excellent with champagne, but I reckon they'd also be good with stout. Fiddly to make, but absolutely delicious. The pastry's very good for other things, too. Happy cooking!

Jet-lag is weird. Italy is magical.

Well, no surprises there. You could hardly expect to sit in three planes over twenty-four hours, cross the equator and who knows how many time zones and not feel weird.

It's just that a holiday is supposed to make you feel rested, and yet here I am feeling not much different than the exhaustion after a work trip.

On the other hand, I have not thought about my work at all for three weeks, and have filled my eyes and ears and, I'm sorry to say, my mouth, too, with sights and sounds and tastes a-plenty.

We did this trip on frequent-flyer points, and with my several weeks' pretty careful planning on the web; and I'm pleased to report all went smoothly. No flight delays; no lost luggage; no dreadful hotels. We stayed in ** or *** pensions and hotels, and while the rooms were always small, they were all clean and quiet, with smooth cotton sheets. The centrepiece of this trip was an eight-day cyling circuit in Italy. We picked up our bikes in Treviso, and every day we'd leave our cases in the hotel lobby and navigate our way to the next town, where the cases would invariably be waiting for us. This was a circuit from Treviso to Venice to Chioggia to Padova to Vincenza to Bassano del Grappa and back to Treviso. J and P did the navigating, and I brought up the rear, day-dreaming my way around the countryside and back lanes of the route. We also gave ourselves a couple of days in Pisa and Florence, a second bite at Venice, an overnight in Milan, and a couple of days in Paris, with visits to family in London at either end.

P took great photos, J sketched in his book and I took a couple of desultory snaps and did some more day-dreaming.

Two highlights.

The first day of our cycling tour was one of the longest: Treviso to Venice. We struggled a bit with the road maps and instructions, and also got a bit lost before heading through the industrial zone of Venice before riding along that long strip of land to the main island. When we got there, we had to find our way through to the Casa San Andrea, on a small lagoon near the Piazzale Roma. When we arrived, we were exhausted and collapsed onto the beds, too tired to get up but wondering if this was going to be such a great idea, if we were going to be too exhausted to see anything of the beautiful places on our itinerary. After a while we regrouped, though, and struggled out to buy vaporetto tickets in time to do the most magical trip down the Grand Canal as the sun began to set. I had not been to Venice for 35 years, and it was P and J's first time. Global traveller that he is, P was still not prepared for the magic of Venice, and it was extremely gratifying to see his amazement. (I can't get the little camera to start at the moment: I'll try again when I'm less tired.) So much water! So many beautiful buildings! I bought myself a creamy guipure lace fan (even the tourist souvenirs are elegant) and for dinner had fresh sea bass with what the waiter called a "sausage": she served my fillets onto a separate plate then mashed up much of the head and other parts with more oil, then strained this extra-flavoured oil over the white flesh. Delicate and delicious.

The restaurant was just around the corner from the piazza San Marco; just near it was the entrance to one of the narrow calles that lead you into the shops and alleys and laneways. People would mysteriously enter or leave in single-file; so as we were sitting and watching we had this tremendous sense of potential: the city both opened up to us, like the fish served before me, along the Grand Canal; but also holding its secrets in reserve.

When we returned a week later, it was to a different hotel, and with a date. I'd found a website selling tickets to a performance of the Barber of Seville in a palace, and had booked, but failed to print off a map. We had a day touring and wandering around, and had planned to go back to the hotel, change, and get directions. Instead we decided just to find our way there. Turns out there is not just one Palazzo Barbarigo on the map, though. We wandered and wandered, and eventually found our way to La Fenice, thinking the main opera house would know where it was (I knew our palace was not far from there). But the box office had closed (they'd had an afternoon performance) and the cloakroom staff had never heard of it. I was starting to think I'd been the victim of a scam. I started desperately asking strangers, as I had enough Italian to ask politely for directions (though my comprehension of the spoken word is only rudimentary). Most people had never heard of it; but one man gave me detailed instructions I couldn't follow... Eventually I strolled boldly into a posh hotel and asked the concierge, who gave me several maps, the brochure from the company and set me straight, also running out after me when I left the reservation behind.

Eventually we did find the entrance, down the darkest of narrow dark alleyways, with a locked gate and a sign with a hand pointing mysteriously around the corner, which seemed to lead only to an apartment entrance. Then we found the button you pressed; and a voice said they would open the door at 8.00. So we went off to eat, and came back in plenty of time. It was a chamber performance — four or five singers; a piano, a cello and two violins — performed in several different rooms in the Barbarigo-Minotto palace; and it was utterly magical. The rooms could accommodate only about 50 people, and the singers were wonderfully engaging, moving amongst the audience with charm and grace. Beautiful strong voices and accomplished acting all round. No sur-titres, no sets apart from the palace itself, but it was perfect for this drawing-room opera to be staged in drawing-rooms with Tiepolo paintings and a palatial bedroom. When Figaro shaves Dr Bartolo, we were close enough to smell the shaving foam. After the first act, we were ushered into a different room, but invited to take in the view of the grand canal from the balcony. When you're in Venice as a tourist, you get glimpses of much wealthier travellers and residents in private courtyards and balconies. For a brief moment, we had our own balcony from which to look out at the water traffic below. Pretty much a perfect musical experience, I would say.

Other wonderful things on this trip: a Chopin concert in a C13 church in Paris; As You Like It at the Globe in London; the artichoke tart served with gorgonzola cappucino followed by potato ravioli with truffles and truffle oil at an unassuming little restaurant halfway between Bassano and Treviso; mint liquorice and morello cherry gelati eaten on the enormous chessboard in the square at Marostica; Giotto's Scrovegni chapel in Padua; being given two huge bunches of grapes by a lovely family as we rode from Vincenza to Bassano; reading A Room with a View in Florence; supper at the Mozzarella Bar, also in Florence; buying a coral and glass necklace in Venice; sneaking into my nephew's choral rehearsal in the Temple church in London; two pilgrimages in Paris: first, to climb the towers of Notre Dame after an hour queuing in the sun to see the chimeres and gargoyles up close; and another to take J to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre; and a day in London with our dearest, much-missed family friends currently taking a sabbatical in Oxford.

Oh. And in case you're thinking this all sounds too perfect, factor in the horror of waking up in the middle of the night in Bassano, and realising you have developed a case of raging conjunctivitis. Spend several hours lying awake rehearsing conversations in your elementary Italian about locating and talking to pharmacists and doctors. But then when you tell your partner, he reaches into his first-aid kit and pulls out the broad spectrum anti-biotic drops for ears and eyes... Oh. What can I say? It was perfect after all.

Clearing the decks

Well, I said a few days ago that I had finished my essay, which I am now calling "Transparent Walls: Stained Glass and Cinematic Medievalism." But there was one more stage, to send it to a few people to read. One came back with some extraordinarily helpful technical advice; the other drew attention to the embarrassingly large number of apologies, signposts and diffuse explanations that were really clogging up the essay. I'm lucky to have such good friends and relations (any one else channelling A.A. Milne with that phrase?); and have spent a cold winter's day correcting mistakes, unclogging the essay, converting footnotes to endnotes and writing an abstract. I have just pressed "send" to move it off my desk onto someone else's.

We are heading out tonight to a winter solstice feast. I'm taking the two small left-over Christmas puddings I've had in the fridge for (1) six and (2) eighteen months. I poured extra brandy over them last night and they look as fresh as when they were first cooked. We are all invited to bring a seasonal poem to read, and I have been practising the first six stanzas of Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Go here for text, with glosses and recording. But here's the text:

Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte Suld correspond and be equivalent: Richt sa it wes quhen I began to wryte This tragedie; the wedder richt fervent, Quhen Aries, in middis of the Lent, Schouris of haill gart fra the north discend, That scantlie fra the cauld I micht defend. Yit nevertheles within myne oratur I stude, quhen Titan had his bemis bricht Withdrawin doun and sylit under cure, And fair Venus, the bewtie of the nicht, Uprais and set unto the west full richt Hir goldin face, in oppositioun Of God Phebus, direct discending doun. Throwout the glas hir bemis brast sa fair That I micht se on everie syde me by; The northin wind had purifyit the air And sched the mistie cloudis fra the sky; The froist freisit, the blastis bitterly Fra Pole Artick come quhisling loud and schill, And causit me remufe aganis my will. For I traistit that Venus, luifis quene, To quhome sum tyme I hecht obedience, My faidit hart of lufe scho wald mak grene, And therupon with humbill reverence I thocht to pray hir hie magnificence; Bot for greit cald as than I lattit was And in my chalmer to the fyre can pas. Thocht lufe be hait, yit in ane man of age It kendillis nocht sa sone as in youtheid, Of quhome the blude is flowing in ane rage; And in the auld the curage doif and deid Of quhilk the fyre outward is best remeid: To help be phisike quhair that nature faillit I am expert, for baith I have assaillit. I mend the fyre and beikit me about, Than tuik ane drink, my spreitis to comfort, And armit me weill fra the cauld thairout. To cut the winter nicht and mak it schort I tuik ane quair - and left all uther sport - Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious Of fair Creisseid and worthie Troylus.

A day off tomorrow for cooking and having some other folk for dinner; then it's back to the Garter. I'm giving myself a day in the State Library on Monday, reading Anstis's 1724 edition of the Black Book, the Register of the Order, and will treat myself at lunchtime at Mr Tulk's cafe with the radicchio and talaggio* focaccia, which is almost as much fun to say as it is to eat.

It's very satisfying to finish and send off a discrete piece of work. I'm looking forward to returning the books and DVDs to the library, and cleaning my desk and piles of books and papers belonging to this project. I've also finished my ARC assessments, so I'm clearing the decks (desk) in all kinds of ways. Really, soon, there'll be nothing to do but finish writing this book.

taleggio. (thanks, Anthony. Yeah, Middle Scots is easy: it's the Italian that's tricky!)

You Know You're in North America ...

• when you can buy organic blue corn chips, and scoff them down with divine spicy mango and lime salsa (yep; found a great deli on 13th street) from a jar, but tasting fresh and not over-pickled. I don't know how American folk survive in Australia when the only corn chips you can get are over-processed and taste like twisties. Love that dark blue crispy goodness. The packet says blue corn is a Hopi and Zuni tradition. I don't know where those tribes are from, or where they are now, but blue corn makes great chips.

• when the streets are named after numbers or trees. Philadelphia was laid out on a grid, like Manhattan (and Melbourne), so 1st street runs north-south along the eastern side of the city, and along the Delaware river, and then the cross streets, running east-west, have names like Vine, Spruce, Walnut, Chestnut, Pine, Locust, Cherry, Lombard and Filbert, though with the exception of the two widest streets that intersect neatly at City Hall, the even more generically named Market and Broad. It will be blindingly obvious to locals here, but I hope useful to prospective first-time visitors to the US to note that the numbers along the streets don't always run consecutively, but locate the address much more precisely in relation to the numbered streets. So, my address is 1601 Sansom, because it's on the corner of 16th street. The numbers go along a bit, then start again at 1701 on the corner of 17th st. Makes it very easy to know which block of the street is the address you want. (Took me several visits to work this out, I'm sorry to say.)
  
• (and at one of the great ivy league universities) when the library is still busy at 6.30 on a Friday night. I spent the day in the well-stocked library yesterday, and was impressed by how hard everyone was working. If there was a moment's talking, it was only a moment. And at 6.30, it was still busy. David's graduate class is full of voracious readers. He says you give them a chapter to read and they are just as likely to read the whole book. Currently, at least, on Penn's home page is a picture of the recently re-modelled stairwell in the English department. Pretty nice, huh? Wonder if they change that picture of Will around much.

• when, after a hard day's slog in the library (really, really working hard to see if the insights of medievalism can help us read medieval texts), you decide to treat yourself, and you can walk just five blocks from your apartment, waltz in to the Kimmel Centre, and pick up a ticket for that evening's performance of Gil Shaham playing Khatchaturian's Violin Concerto and the Philadelphia Philharmonic belting out Dvorak's 8th symphony. The Centre is amazing. It is several venues enclosed under a soaring glass arched roof; and the concert hall we were in is like being inside a multi-tiered cello: all curves like a cello's body (sometimes just one or two rows of seats along the side walls), and all — floor, walls, ceiling — made of lustrous dark red wood (Cherry, perhaps?). I was in the front of the top tier, but the sound was still pretty good. I don't go to that many classical concerts, but this was splendidly enjoyable, and I'm not sure why I don't go more often. I am also honouring the injunction of (a different) Paul who recommends "lots of treats" to counteract homesickness and the exhaustion of study. So, in the next few days, I have to send off the latest draft of the paper Tom and I are giving here on Friday, work on the revisions of my ANZAMEMS paper from Hobart for submission to a journal, and also put together a talk for NYU on Thursday. Chapter One is now locked into place, so I'll extract from that.
• when, generally, you feel the mixture of exhilaration of being in a different place and the luxury of hibernating away, writing and reading in a pristine apartment with few distractions, or a calm and productive library, but you are also looking forward to the rest of your family joining you in a couple of weeks for the pleasure of exploring another city. I'm almost at the end of the quietest writing time of my trip away, and will start travelling and socialising a bit more quite soon.
  

Michelle Grattan draws a line

Reporting on Anna Bligh's historic victory in Queensland (first woman state premier to be elected, rather than coming to office upon a retirement), in an election many thought would see a massive swing (in the end the Labor party looks to lose only about 6 0f 89 seats), Michelle Grattan writes in The Age:

The comfortable victory of Premier Anna Bligh draws a line over a string of recent setbacks at the state level for the ALP, and the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday praised Ms Bligh's "gutsy performance".

Hmm. " ... draws a line over". Is this a (sub-editorial?) mistake for "draws a line under", or is it a new usage that acknowledges the way we now produce text, as in a blog, so that the most recent comes at the top of the "page"? Have people been doing this for ages (drawing lines "over") without my noticing? Or is it a usage common from commerce or business, where one tends to file with the most recent on top?

Anyone else seen this before?

Glorious blue skies and Sunday morning sunshine over the city in Philadelphia this morning. A little work on the second section of Chapter Two, then I'm off to the Art Museum. And that's another thing. Why are big civic art collections called museums in the US, and galleries in Australia?

But I'm increasingly thinking the language problem here is mine. I went to the wonderful Reading Terminal Market yesterday (undercover; huge variety of stalls, though not the aisles and aisles of fruit and veg I'm familiar with from the Vic Market in Melbourne; and apparently some Amish produce), and asked for a large tub of tabbouleh and a small of babaganoush, whereupon the attendant produced two small tubs of babaganoush and a large tub of hummus. Anyway, I'm now stocked up on home-made lentil soup and falafel, as well.

Proves I was right to contact the travel agent in Boulder by email, though, rather than by phone. Who knows where I would have ended up?

Why I love Melbourne, Part whatever...

Well, we always knew Melbourne was the cafe and coffee heart of Australia, thanks mostly to our post-war Italian and Greek immigrant population. This was confirmed a few months ago when Starbucks confirmed it was closing down 61 of its 84 Australian outlets. Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne had most of these and they were always going to struggle against a specialist coffee culture that was well entrenched since the 80s. Melbourne in particular prides itself on its European-ness, in places like Carlton and St Kilda; and I must admit I do love to try out the tiny cafes in the network of arcades in the heart of the city.

We found ourselves in the Royal Arcade at Christmas, looking for the Oxfam shop to buy goats and vegetable gardens, and were reminded of the magnificent Gog and Magog clock there....


Here are a few other pics I've found: the arcades range from grand ones like the Royal and Block arcades (note the Hopetoun tea rooms on the right below: great place to meet your aunt for afternoon tea) ...

... to the less formal lanes that criss-cross between the arcades...
... to the somewhat more jazzy ones west of Elizabeth St. This is Hardware lane:
In this last one, note the sign on the left: this is one of a number of chocolate bars and cafes that now dot the city as the cafes do. There's a lovely article on this new chocolate culture in the paper this morning. Makes me want to forget those pesky New Year's resolutions and head down for a Belgian hot chocolate with chili. Shudders in anticipation...

New Year, Traditions

Over at In the Middle folks are discussing their New Year's Eve traditions. They seem to involve civilised things like watching the television.

Down here, chez nous, that's for Christmas night, when we invariably and inexplicably watch the dancesport championships and try and predict the verdict of the unseen judges, as to who can do the best samba (from positions of pure ignorance, you understand). A day or two later, it's time to start cleaning up the garden, moving the furniture, shopping for extra glasses, having delightful conversations with the girls at Flowers Flowers on St Georges Road (no website; but thoroughly recommended for unusual and startling flowers and brilliant ideas) and cooking up a storm. We have had a party every year since the millennium, with the exception of 2006 when I was coming to the exhausting end of the radiotherapy, and we just love it. We end up doing odd things, though, like cutting plastic cups in half and using them to float 50 citronella candles in the fishpond (it looked fantastic), and setting bamboo flares alight with a little too much lamp oil. We also wear out our legs and feet and sometimes get a bit exhausted by the scale of things. For Paul it was the number of mangoes he cut up; for Joel, the garden lights that kept getting in a tangle; for me, it was the last three stuffed peaches, the last three cheese profiteroles, and the last three pastry tartlets filled with smoked salmon and dill-flavoured cream cheese. But people bring such good cheer to a New Year's party that it is always a delight. They bring wine; some bring food; and some bring friends and neighbours.

It's not such a late night as it used to be. I can remember Joel sitting up with his grandmother watching television as the new millennium dawned over the Sydney Opera House: singers and musicians calling in the new year with eerie, otherworldly sounds. But it is summer here, and not far from the summer solstice, so New Year's is a lovely time to be outside and up late. And up early, if you have the energy.

We are still cleaning up, though, slowly moving the furniture back into place, soaking the tablecloths in bleach, eating up leftovers, and making sorbet from the left-over fruit...

One of the best things, too, was finding the little vegetable knife Maggie Tomlinson had given me years ago. I thought it had disappeared, but it was just in the back of the cutlery draw. When she gave it to me (a wedding? a birthday?) she pasted a small coin to the card. I didn't know this tradition: that if you give something sharp like a knife or scissors, the coin stops the blade cutting the friendship.

Oh, and if you are reading this blog and wondering why you didn't get an invite to this party, I'm very sorry: we are much better at the food than we are at the invitations. Drop me a hint and I'll do better next (i.e. this) year.

Happy New Year to all.

Day After Breast Cancer Day

Well, I wasn't really worried, but I'm very glad, all the same, to report that there is no sign of anything alarming on mammogram or ultrasound, and that Suzanne has given me the all-clear. It's quite a business. The mammogram is somewhat more painful on the site of the scarring, and the ultrasound (sonogram) sensor presses in quite hard and insistently on and around the area of my surgery, so it's hard not to be reminded of the initial scan, just over two years ago, when the technician went over and over the same area without saying a word. I remember when I left the room, he had frozen the screen on this big black cloud in the middle. Even if it wasn't my tumour, I still had that image in mind till I saw my doctor the next day. But I was pretty sure it was cancer, anyway, from the discovery of the very first dimple.

But that was a different hospital. The breast unit where I have all my treatment is run by a series of ministering angels. Every single person who works there is wonderful. The first thing the radiologist said when she came in to do the scan was to say that the x-rays were clear. And once she had had a good look, she told me then, too, that the ultrasounds were clear too.

So by the time I saw Suzanne, I was calm, with my mind at ease. As usual, we talked first about what it meant to be in the world before we talked about my health. Or at least, we began with my saying how hard it was to be in the university sector at the moment. But we ended by agreeing that if you love the work you do, and have your health, it's important, and good, to focus on that work, not the extraneous things if you can help it. This reminds me to keep working away at the things I love best about my job, while I can still do it.

For the first time she raised the possibility of some reconstructive surgery, but my case is so marginal it's hard to imagine it being worth it. I honestly forget about my slight lopsidedness once I'm dressed. And if other people notice or mind, too bad!

Anyway, I'm calling that two years down, with three years to go of my current treatment regime. Hooray!!

And in fact, when I got to work, our Middle English reading group had planned a special lunchtime meeting, for timetabling reasons, and because we are reading Havelok, we had a Danish feast. We had a number of different cheeses, some fantastic fresh dark rye bread Andrew had driven miles to buy, homemade coleslaw, some liver paté, with chopped up bacon to sprinkle over the top, lots of smoked salmon, three (count them: three) different kinds of herrings (I've never eaten them, but started with some in a wonderful mustard sauce, and am now converted), and some crispbread. Plus strong coffee, rum balls and what we call Danish pastries. I asked Annemarie, our Danish admin. assistant, to come in and authenticate and taste our food. She was somewhat dismissive of our pastries, I'm afraid, but approved of the bread and herrings and cheese and salami.

I took some photos, but had the phone switched to take only tiny photos. Here they are, anway:

Birthday turrets

I offered to make my friend Paula a birthday cake, and asked what kind of cake she would like. "Bananas are nice", she said. "Pooh!" I said, "that's not very festive!" So having told her what she didn't want, after asking her what she did want, this is what we made. Unfortunately, it suffered a minor collapse during the afternoon, and you can see it's had to be pushed back up, but it was truly spectacular, all the same.

It was a classic joint enterprise. I used 15 egg whites, half a kilo of ground hazlenuts and four cake tins of three different sizes, and melted the chocolate, and mixed up the coffee-flavoured and sweetened cream, and sliced the strawberries, and then Paul assembled the layers of meringue, brushed them with (organic, free-trade, 70%) chocolate, and sandwiched them together with fruit and cream, in this wonderfully asymmetrical fantasy cake. It's a version of the recipe we associate with Christmas and birthdays in my family, but I've never seen it put together like this! And yes, there were bananas in some of the layers, too. I was the classic nay-sayer, when Paul started talking about turrets, but in fact, the highest point of the cake on the left, was the most successful: layers and layers of meringue and cream and chocolate.

We sat Paula behind the cake, on her red couch with the red wall behind her, and voilà! the beauteous vision in the photo. Happy birthday, dear friend!

Christmas lunch for 15? not a problem. Or is it?

Every Christmas Eve, Paul's family takes it in turns to go to his brother's place by the beach, his sister's in the country, or our place in the city. This year it was our turn. Photos aren't particularly good; posted here for the benefit of non-Australian readers who wonder what Christmas might look like in summer. Actually it was a bit chilly in the morning, but by afternoon warm enough to sit outside. For the first time since Joel, Angus and Sarah were born in the same year, there were only five grandchildren present: Nick, 18, was visiting his girlfriend's family.

We went all out with the food, since it's the first time for months our dining table didn't have my computer on it, and it was fun to put three tables together, bring in the garden chairs, and scrape the drawers for enough forks and spoons. Also, one child has a severe nut allergy, and another is vegetarian, so we had lots of options in addition to the paella and baked ham you see here. I can't believe I don't have a photo of my pudding, but it was glistening with butter and fruit, and the blue flame of the brandy. Note also the festive lights decorating the fishtank.

What an opulent display, though. At the time it felt like a lovely thing to do, to work and cook and clean for the family, but seeing the food in all its lavishness is a bit ghastly now. This family is very restrained with presents, but even so, I can't help feeling some of the best gifts we were given this year were a chicken for a Philippines family and a vegetable garden in Mozambique. Must make sure I shop at Oxfam next year.

Overheard on the bike path

Riding north along the Upfield bike path this afternoon, as it follows the train line west of Sydney Road (yep, just keep heading north to the Emerald City), I saw a man riding a bike with a girl sitting comfortably behind him. He must have been standing up on the pedals the whole way. As we crossed, I heard him say distinctly, "So at that time you weren't going to be in the circus, but then you were?"

Isn't that great? I spent a while pondering the grammatical ambiguity here; was she now going to be in the circus? or was she now in the circus? or had she been going to be in the circus, but now she wasn't (a counter-factual imperfect?)? Is "were" the principal verb, or does it leave the "going to be" understood? I need a grammatical analysis of the different temporalities and tenses at work here.

Either way, she was having a lovely ride in the sun. And so did I, stopping to load up my panier on the left side, a shopping bag on the right handle bar, both filled with dried fruit that is now soaking in beer, brandy and port ready to make Christmas puddings. OK, a little late, but still a glad contrast to last year when my father had to come to my rescue and help me because I couldn't stir them. Twelve months later, I plan to have the mixture all assembled when my family comes to afternoon tea on Sunday, so we can all have a stir and make a wish.