A taste of summer

Melbourne's wet weather has not been kind to tomatoes. Especially mine. Despite being given some beautiful seedlings last spring, I didn't get around to planting them until well after Christmas, which as Kevin Heinze could have told me is way too late to plant tomatoes. Meanwhile a couple of self-sown plants bravely emerged from the compost.

But lo and behold now in the depths of winter a few hardy plants have survived to give me a tiny taste of home-grown goodness.

Here is a picture of the latest little batch.

Lawrence and Lindsay

The latest Ancora Press project is a poem by Jack Lindsay about D. H. Lawrence. The free-verse poem laments Lindsay's failure to meet Lawrence during Lawrence's visit to Australia - although Lindsay and Lawrence corresponded after Lindsay moved to England, unfortunately they never actually met.

My job for tonight was setting the notes, which taught me that Lindsay, Frank Johnson and Kenneth Slessor edited a literary quarterly called Vision in 1923-24. Thanks as ever to Trove for the bibliographic details. I also learnt that Lindsay lived in a rented house in Bondi before his move to England.

The setting of the poem is nearly finished but it will take some time to set the comprehensive notes and the introduction by John Arnold. Publication will probably be in early 2012.

MCC library fact sheets

One of the hidden treasures of the Melbourne Cricket Ground is the Melbourne Cricket Club library. For every match day at the MCG the staff and volunteers produce a fact sheet, full of fascinating historical and statistical information about the teams playing that day.

On Saturday night I dropped in as usual to pick up the sheet, but was stopped in my tracks by a lovely exhibit dedicated to Bob Davis. Earlier in the year a friend and I took a tour of The Crooked Staffe exhibition which gave a great insight into the collection of cricket books and artefacts of the MCC library and the MCC museum. If like me you're lucky enough to be an MCC member you can visit the library any time; otherwise I highly recommend you go on a tour.

Here is the link to the online version of the fact sheets. Make sure you check out the fact sheet for the Geelong v Hawthorn match of 11 June 2011, featuring the Bob Davis tribute.

E M Forster

For some unknown reason I've suddenly developed a hankering to read E.M. Forster again. I haven't read his books for many years and I wonder if I'll like them as much this time around. I don't think I have any on hand in the 'home library', so was pleased to find Howard's End and A Room With a View available via the Stanza app. Looking forward to rediscovering them once I finish The Ice Princess and the L.M. Montgomery books (currently reading Rainbow Valley, only Rilla of Ingleside to go).

Grown larger

One of our favourite pastimes while perusing the menu in a restaurant is checking for typos and other oddities. The most consistent error we find is 'Crown larger', which we like to interpret as a misspelling of 'Grown larger', rather than the name of an overpriced beer.

Today I found in my letterbox a free sample of craisins, with a promotional brochure and recipes. I had never heard of craisins until I visited Boston a couple of years ago, where they popped up in a salad, along with edamame. I was very taken with them and delighted to discover that they could be purchased back home under the more prosaic name of dried cranberries.

I was very pleased with the free sample and decided to check out more recipes on the craisin people's website. I found a rather appealing recipe for aubergine crostini with cranberry pesto. Among the ingredients of this recipe is '1 large banquette, sliced thinly'. I imagine it's quite difficult to slice up a banquette, but even if it were possible I doubt if it would go with the craisins.

On the couch

I would like to say I'm watching On the couch while sitting on the couch, but it wouldn't be true. Instead I'm sitting in an armchair with an interesting provenance (if indeed an armchair can be said to have an interesting provenance).

My armchairs first came into my world in 1970-something when a friend offloaded them because she found them too old fashioned. I loved them, but when I moved to a tiny house in Port Melbourne there was sadly no room for them, so they were offloaded to another friend.

Time went by and the chairs were in turn offloaded to a friend of my other friend. And then that friend of my friend decided they were no longer required. Meanwhile I had moved to another small house which luckily had grown enough to accommodate the armchairs. Back they came, in a somewhat sorry state, but with a spot of loving care from an upholstery service, they resumed service.

View from my armchair: the other armchair

Kardinia Park: the early years

My early experience of Kardinia Park was as a toddler. I faintly remember sitting in my pusher and being totally bored because I couldn't see anything except people's legs. When just a little older, but still not very interested in the games I couldn't see, I used to wander off and climb the pine trees at the river end of the ground, near where the Doug Wade stand is now.

As time moved on and I developed an interest in the game, my sisters and I would get to the ground early so we could sit on the seats around the boundary line. Those were the days of Polly Farmer, Billy Goggin, Paul Vinar (my favourite, for some reason), the wonderful Lord twins, Terry Callan and John Sharrock.

Sadly we moved to Melbourne and the trips to Geelong gradually became less frequent as family commitments took over. We saw Geelong through the dark days of the 70s and 80s mostly at Waverley and the MCG. On one memorable occasion in the 1970s we spent a weekend in Geelong and rejoiced in an unexpected victory over Collingwood at a packed Kardinia Park. We had to hitchhike home because of a train strike, but it hardly seemed to matter.

The later 1980s and early 1990s were the Gary Ablett years. What excitement Gary and Malcolm Blight brought to Geelong! We have rarely missed a game at Kardinia Park ever since.