If you can't find goat's milk fromage blanc...

It's time I moved on from my rant about alot [sic]. I could begin this entry with a foray into my town's Eagle Boys and their pizza's on special (brandished across a sign perched beside a busy roundabout, thus increasing my chance of death by ectopic apostrophe). But it's late in the evening and I should be sensible with my heart rate.

The spotted apostrophe monster makes me angry. Quite often. A lot. This makes it such a joy to read a glossy magazine with all its apostrophic morsels intact. And it is from such a magazine that I'm going to share a little something which all ended in tears. Joyous tears of the hysterical, body heaving variety. Let us go back nearly seven years to when I am in Melbourne. Of course, it is wet. Winter is vile with seeping cold yet, as ever, heady with culture and cheap takeaway. It is on such cracker black, bruised and soggy nights I cosy up in my Box Hill kitchen, unable to sleep, to pore over recipe books or posh, high-end travel and entertainment magazines (stolen from my psychaitrist's and doctor's waiting rooms in general. Oh, and once from the mechanic at the end of the street). In such an environment, it is easy to indulge in recipes you know you'll be able to find the ingredients for, if not visit the chef's actual restaurant over the next weekend. I believe such heady reading late at night is, as a good friend of mine puts it, 'food porn'. I've spent a significant proportion of my late night adult life fondling the folds of recipe books and gourmet magazines. No fuss (no mess) no calories. And all those deliciously onomatopoeically charged words such as the portly portabello mushroom, fennelguk? fennelgeek? And caperberry.

So here I am now, nearly seven years on from abandoning my rainy post in Melbourne and running out of money in Karratha - not necessarily completely unserendipitously, the spot in Australia most diametrically opposed to Melbourne - a vast outpost and timeworn rock shop. This place is Hot. Red. Separated from the known universe by the horizon. Which is to say, if you walk to the end of my street, you will fall off. Not the sidewalk, but the end of the universe.

Karratha, gateway to awesome natural wonder, awesome landscapes and awe ore (one might call this region a Chinese fortune cookie), is in close proximity to an array of yearned for features, such as the long drop wonder of Karijini gorges, limitless space crowded only by saltbush and good drying days, and that stunning midnight glitterati - our not so humble, multi billion dollar gas plants.

Sadly, however, there is other stuff we can't boast of. Take, for instance, this food porn folly. It's all well and good for me these days to pick up a gourmet travel magazine (sure my dentist doesn't mind) or a fancy schmancy food glossy. It's another thing to find half of its contortionesque ingredients lists in our shops. I once managed to salivate myself into a puddle over a wagyu beef burger recipe with organic this, hand fed that, and pickled whatsihooses. And subsequently did the hard yards to build the thing. But with our range of grocery options extending to Cs and Ws, the burger was yummy. For a burger. Beef - beef. Bacon - not organic. Cheese...tasty. Not gruyere. Etc. Beloved loved it. He loves anything he doesn't have to cook. So, on my cooking nights (the 364 days of the year we don't eat a tuna sandwich) I am exulted and praised beyond Anne Tenney's wildest imaginings. Amazing how loved one can feel when one places microwaved boxed barra with hot chips and vinegar on the humble dinner plate.

But, back to the porn. It's Sunday night. All on my lonesome. On the couch. Begin canoodling with a five year old copy of Vogue Entertaining. It's plastered with mini Italian gelatis, coated in pastel chocolate and always worth a drool. My old favourite mag. And I indulge, flick through luscious culinary exploits. Then I am halted by a crazy, if not ironically logical thought: after all these years, isn't it about time I cook something out of this magazine rather than just licking the pages?

Flicking through, I arrive at a comfortable page. One whose recipes correspond with a delightful tale of fresh, tropical summers and nostalgic ocean breezes. Close enough to home I thought. Except we have mudflats, strong winds and the occasional cyclone to decrease summer nostalgia and electricity supplies on occasion (although not this year). Anyway, it felt right, this fare. So I grabbed pen and paper and began to peruse the ingredients list of a simple looking salad with green beans. It incorporated seven ingredients, the easiest of which to source were salt and pepper. Lemon peel was also fine. Lemon infused olive oil - could even manage that in Karratha (I know this because a couple of weeks ago I thought everything I stirfried was off because it would suddenly take on this heady left-in-the-pantry-for-a-decade whiff in the wok. Nope. Took me a while to work out I'd accidently bought lemon olive oil rather than the plain variety and, in a fit of pique, binned the lemon olive oil in melodramatic ferocity for its clever tactic of destroying several of the previous week's meals.)

But with Pilbara eyes rather than market extravaganza Melbourne ones, things went a little haywire after this. I was offered options for the beans: Roman beans, round beans or runner beans. Hmmm...I mused...then there are my options: slightly bruised from the truck beans, frozen beans or, out on a limb here, baked beans. I was tending towards the latter if for nothing but the joy of feeling I was pushing the culinary envelope just like this Vogue. Ok. So, we're going baked beans rather than Roman ones. Tick.

Now, what to do about the stoned olives (is that really the phrase? Like they've been marinated and bottled in weed for a year or two?). The recipe asked me to use Niçoise or Ligurian olives. Now, first of all, any ingredient with a word containing a squiggled cedilla ç was bound to be unnatainable in the Pilbara. I mean, we're talking about a place where such beautiful French street names as Legendre are necessarily pronounced 'Legendah. Mate.' And what does a Ligurian olive look like? More to the point (and this is getting weird now) what does a stoned Ligurian olive look like? I hear that and I'm thinking of an imported roadside worker, melting in the heat and out to it after a big night at Trawlers (No kidding, that's was the name of our nightclub. Thank goodness, they've just renamed it). Again, my choices for olives were less...exotic: Bottled or unbottled. And less onomatopoeically luxurious than stoned, I could buy them pitted...or unpitted.

Then we're down to the final ingredient. And here's where my spiral into a mise en abyme of possessed hilarity gained its ultimate and final momentum:

Please use '80 grams of goat's milk fromage blanc.'

Fromage blanc. Is that like creme fraiche? Or cheese? I wondered if I might be able to find some goat's milk Fruche. Even if not goat's milk flavour, would strawberry Fruche do? Or lemon lime (to complement the olive oil)? Or, what about that pomegranate Fruche I'm sure I saw? Suffice to say, Karratha and goat's milk fromage blanc - not a happening thing.

BUT -

Joy of joys, this ingredient was suffixed with an friendly little *. The Asterisk of Hope in my baked bean, black olive and pomegranate salad. This asterisk would hopefully offer me a fair trade. So I'm thinking...creme cheese? Marscapone cheese even? Or maybe just Bega? So I scan the page, hunting down directions for assembling this salad until I reach the recipe's end. And there it is, in a flourish of italics, my salvation. Awaiting confirmation of the simpler option, I read the asterisked postscript:

*If you can't find goat's milk fromage blanc, substitue for marinated Persian feta...

WTF?

Suffice to say, I laughed. Aloud. A lot. Then I closed my Vogue Entertaining and toddled out to the kitchen pantry for a late night snack. Baked beans, of course. Followed by a punnet of Fruche. And I went to bed, spent and satiated. And slept soundly, dreaming of stoned Persian goats nibbling on olive pips somewhere far, oh so very far, from here.

Today, only two words are getting to me

My little skirt

A disclaimer (that I feel compelled to offer one is testament to having a woman's body in these times. And there is the corresponding fact that, were I a man, it wouldn't even occur to me to need to disclaim in the first place): I am about to write about having a body, at age 39, I'm happy with. Indeed, one I should have just got on and been glitteringly happy with for 20 years.

It's about my skirt. The short one. And possibly one, maybe two, no, three pairs of shorts I currently cycle through on a weekly basis. This is in a region of Australia where one can only feel irrelevant when Kmart introduces its winter stock of jeans, jackets and cardigans in April. These are the clothes in which I feel most comfortable. It's always hot here. I have a dozen eggs I could poach on the dirt now to prove it.

Anyway, the skirt in question is short, fitted, faded maroon and courderoy. God, that sounds bad. The last thing I owned in courderoy I'm certain I carried library books from primary school home in. But it fits snuggly  (as opposed to the noun, Snuggy, which, apart from having no use for up here, I am forbidden by pride and the Lord - I'm sure - to wear). My little courderoy miniskirt cosies up to my hips and looks...chic? I reckons anyway, with a tan belt. The shorts are tan, khaki, both worn with this very same belt and, from the waist down, look just fine, thank you very much. Now, you can't see me and you don't know me. But if I might be so bold, thus crushing the stereotype of the 'woman's self esteem vortex of terror' thingy for just a sentence, I've got the legs for it.

In fact, at 39, my legs are twice as good as they were twenty years ago. I worked on that, twenty years ago. And now, after two decades of constant second guessing and disbelief about this newfound slimness (which still feels newfound in some ways) I'm one of those skinny bitches who can put a hand through their thighs. Oh, gentleman, no, not there. Yes, just above my knees, doofuses. That's right, stand up, knees together, and there's that gaping hole. Not that this should be a prerequisite whatsoever for short skirts and shorts. But, for whatever quirks of culture and Zeitgest, I have thinnish legs of the medially concave variety which nobody appears to mind being in short attire...yet.

Yet.

As I mentioned parenthetically, some part of me thinks I'm going to wake up any day back in the body of my nineteen year old self. I ate more boston bun icing, coffee scrolls, jam and cream doughnuts, hot chips, cold Coke, deep fried icecream and double battered sausages in my final years of high school than you'd see in one of those all-American food stuffing competitions. And then I rewrote my body, over one year. I dropped 20 kilos (yep, easy at that. Just like lugging around a 20 litre tub of Hellman's Mayonaise and simply, wooop! dropping it). Became an aerobics instructor (junkie), dumped meat (obsessively) and existed on a diet of coffee, yoghurt, Diet Coke and a lettuce (just one lettuce, which delighted my eyes, if not my palette, by looking somewhat like chocolate fondue after about nine months).

We used to joke amongst our aerobics instructor selves that we'd be forever reminding the class to rehydrate with buckets of water after a heart slogging session of rampant 90s disco mix, then toddle off to the cafe and rehydrate our posh sneakered limbs wth a litre, sometimes two, of gut rotting, tooth decaying diet cola. Two litres. That's each. Each. One such instructor friend had a bone scan done once, only to be told she must never - particularly not on her honeymoon when wanton, giddy-headed activity might be at its peak - bungy jump. Apparently she would shatter. Splinter all over those icy New Zealand waters. Which might impact on her ability to coordinate any future easywalk-steptouch combos. And as for the grapevine. Ha! She'd probably come out of that a pulpy, over caffeinated Shiraz. Not a good look.

When I began this blog, it was to be a rumination upon the approach to 40, which I am gearing up for wholeheartedly, if not whole skirtedly. And here's the issue. I would say that finally, just recently - we're talking months maybe, definitely not years -  I have woken less often wondering if the mirror will greet me with all the lard I left behind. And not necessarily because I dread it. More because I'm comfortable with ageing in my head. It's like there's this, 'well, for a 39 year old, you shouldn't be complaining if you've wound up, created, fed, survived with...this. My body and I have reached, well, mostly anyway, an amicable arrangement. This is an arrangement whereby I never step on scales. In addition, I refuse to succumb to the evil logic that I WILL in fact be usurped, wholly, overnight and unsuspectingly by my physique circa 1989. I also actively defy the voices reminding me in that cruelly circular fashion how fluid retention loves stress and salt, thereby I can avoid becoming catatonic with stress over the surely approaching bloating and remedying it with hot chips. Mmmmm...hot chips. And then there's the little voice in my ear, incidental perhaps (because it's not an inner ear voice but someone else's), but nonetheless potent, of my husband this year. 'You're looking scrawny'.

Scrawny? I believe I'm the same height as Kate Moss. And having read something about her ridiculous body stats in 1992, I am quite confident I weigh about twelve kilo's MORE than her. Indeed, when pregnant I probably weighed 36 more. Of course, his comment, versus my perception that I am just sort of fine, or pretty much maybe most days ok with what I see, means that my mirror is lying, if only by a tad. Reminding me that I'm not necessarily objective about my body, unlike most other women...

Kaboom ching.

So, body and I, just getting our act together now. That's the situation. Hence, this is surely the time to embrace, let's say a decade, of wanton, short short and skirt wearing lusciousness. I'll be upon a boat of confidence smooth sailing the roaring forties.

However. In steps Western culture to slap me around a bit. I'm sorry, mass media. You women's magazines, fashion beacons, betrayers of bones beneath haute couture, you suck. You DO (AND YOU DO KNOW THIS) have an immensely constrictive, all consuming power over women's self esteem. We are copiers. Photocopiers. Were we to insert a Photoshop chip into our hypothalamuses, we would airbrush before and after the hairbrush. Blah blah blah. I'm not going address the debate about where the lines are drawn between what we think and what we're told to think and what it's suggested we think and feel and castigate ourselves about.  Might as well tame a tidal wave. And I ain't Moses. Not today anyway (maybe next week if I can muster the energy in between cooking scones with four year olds, running in the park and dashing about preventing small children from drowning or eating whole bowls of dried macaroni, sometimes both at once.)

You see, I'm starting to get this edgy feeling. Not that people are looking. No, it is. It is that people are looking. They're seeing the short skirt. The shorts. The hipster belt. The legs even. And then they're seeing the face. I love a sunburnt cheekbone, complexion weathered veins, with crow's feet run like scarring...and she's in short shorts, AGAIN. I'm aware of Madonna. And I do battle with her 'look'. On the one hand, my logical, defiant self screams, 'You go girl!' Go the biceps, go the taut crevices, go the blonde dye and the Jesus and the CFM dance moves etc. But then, there's this sinking in my gut. 50. I wouldn't be doing this if we were talking about John Travolta, Brad Pitt and George Clooney (nearly 50 fellas, it's ok, not yet). But what does it with Madonna is that, in her desire to defy the stereotype of women and ageing, her face is the least graceful aspect of her body. Mine might be developing telltale creases. But she's pulled out this f-off huge iron and obliterated her history. This does nothing to reverse ageing. All it does is remind the world that she's fucking terrified of it. Such would appear to be the case with Kylie, untold other celebrities and this woman I met poolside in Broome last November. She was from the Peninsula in Melbourne. I was worried when she dived into the pool; her face appeared so frozen it were as if she had been plugged in and a swimming foray would simply mean electric shock and Cactusville.

So, what to do with the skirt? The shorts? The visible thighs with the elongated donut hole proclaiming some strange, ridiculous success as a western woman. Do I keep the skirt until forty, then ditch it? Do I wear the shorts until the whistles stop? (Oh, that's right, they have.) Do I - now here's the thing - do I wait until I hear from a second hand source, a friend's obtuse Facebook status or a passerby at the shops, that there's this woman who should SO cover her legs and dress 'her age'? Do I wait until my husband tells me that I'm scrawny AND I need to put on some pants, goddamnit? Or maybe, and this is what I'm hoping, there will come a day when I will simply wake, dress in any of these items and decide...no. Not me anymore. And go to Millars to buy bermuda shorts (in matching beige with my husband)?

God help me.

Or someone?

Anyway, advice appreciated.

I must return to my scones, begging for butter, all swollen with sultanas and luscious coconut milk. Right now I have conjealed dough all over my courderoy miniskirt, a baby self raising hand print on my bum and a single currant stuck to my left knee. Elegance is an understatement. This is the look de jour and the doorbell has just rung.

The albatross mop

I am not crying over spilt milk. The inflection there, by the way, as you read that sentence, must be on 'crying'. It must also necessarily be delivered in a whining tone. This tone complements the whingy 'y' in crying. You might better think of this first sentence as having been delivered by a whirlwind mother of two who is not not crying, but crying about a broadranging organic kitchen collage.

For, neither am I crying (here it again, that wincing 'y', eyes gone all squinty and pathetic in their condescention) over the tin of curry powder little E_ has managed to infuse the kitchen with. No, it's not some delightful, gourmet Korma by Kurma, built to nuanced perfection by a two year old culinary prodigy. It's just curry. The whole tin. Splayed from the fridge to the sink in piles like raging iron ore dust, the amount akin to a quantity required to adequately nourish, say, a 2000 acre wheat crop.

I'm sticking everywhere I tread. There's also the pulsating berry mush dotted about the dining area beside the kitchen. Momentarily masticated then offered like dollops of change cascading plop, plop, plop into a wishing well.
And then there is general Pilbara about the space. You know, Pilbara. Supposedly means 'dry' in aboriginal language. Should also mean 'vanquishingly dusty' and 'inextricable' and 'radiant against white' and 'incomprehensibly clever at infiltrating hitherto unknown cavities'. Like behind the back of the fridge. Beneath the dirt that's been mopped, mudlike, from the terracotta tiles. Between my teeth. I need dental floss to de-Pilbara on days like today, when I am not crying over spilt milk which has sat unloved, perched precariously on the dastardly corner of the dining table just waiting for small child to suggest its descent into the dry, sticky and too pungent ravages beneath.

Then, there was macaroni and currants for maths this morning. The perils of homeschooling. Or freefalling through the wonders of craft. Craft. Craft has a way of being crafty, all right. I think we might call it conniving instead of craft. In a sentence, we have connived our morning away. Of course, we would thus have to add it to our list of 'c' words. 'C' is for 'conniving': Tricky, sneaky, underhanded, dastardly, sticky, gloopy, gargantuan in its terror. Crunch crunch crunch, after a morning's conniving. And then, if the activity involves, say, tins of Spam, or making collages out of last night's lasagne, then conniving becomes carnivorous. Carnivorous canniving and and Italy's left overs are all over my tiles too. Oh bugger, they've just spilt the split pea and corn soup leftover from lunch. It's lunging, langourously, abseiling in slow motion off the edge of the mountain ash precipice. This dining table's loving it too...A conniving carnivorous cornivourus chorus.

Food is fun. Ha.          Ha.          Ha.

Returning to my beginning (which has become my near end indeed Mr Eliot), I must cite the wondeful tale of five animal friends in Pamela Allen's children's book, Who Sank the Boat?

Was it the milk which poured on the floor?
Was it the curry, cascading, what's more?
Was it the berries all sluggishly stuck?
Or just macarone and currants? Oh fuck.

Who sank the boat? All at once, mish mash and splish splash /I'm sunk and I'm gone, insanity's spawn. (And I'm certain beyond a blackberry's thorn that Pamela Allen's decorum, with her delightful tales of misplaced logic, prevents her from considering 'insanity's spawn' a possible rhyme for any adventure's digressions, any character's transgressions).

As least if my proverbial boat were a'leakin', I could tip it up and simply pour out the milkcurrymacaroniberrycurrantPilbarabechamelminceabseiling corn through the front door and off down the sewage corridors of the street.

Did I mention we need rain here? It's so my turn.

Instead, I am resigned to fill the mop bucket and attend to the misery.

Luckily, it's a clean mop bucket, so when I fill it with wine and dippeth in my fine crystal to partake of its wonder, I'll be the queen. That idea's floating my boat right now. But nay, I believe a good splosh of mop will suffice, and to such duty I now resign my tears. I hate mopping. Mops are grit and grunge and give far too much away. I wish I could kill my mop.

So, ship ahoy. My mophead albatross awaits. An albatross which, unlike Coleridge's foppish neckbrace, is given regular opportunities to redeem itself in the name of ephemeral domestic purification.

So who DID sink the boat?
It was, quite simply, just me, after all, the one left in charge of defeating the squall.

I should have mopped days ago.

Conversation with a cyclone

It is hard to believe your nerve. We thought you might be coming a little sooner. Now we believe you're not coming at all. You've simply piked. Yes, whimped out, taunting us with your little sidekicks forming somewhere around 90 degrees and sashaying about a little on the spot then drifting off in an always southwesterly directiong before fading, lost in ocean swell. You've had the power of a party popper. All poooof, pffft, a little spray of colour, a little tinkle of dust particles made to step momentarily sideways in the wake of the pithy flutterings of crepe.

This is north west WA, dear cyclone, grand whirling adventurer of the sea and threatener of the coast. It is our time. Aside the cruel fact that we're gagging for your rain, you rehydrate our bones. Mine are wizened now. Waiting, sucking on dry air and swallowing the occasional spit of some renegade cloud. Have you ever felt like a drybaked chicken carcas, cyclone? I am crisp to the touch, my nerves burning electric, singing through the air like power wires strung pole to pole across the landscape.

So, we charge you with negligence. For this is a place of climactic irony. We who choose to force ourselves upon this place accept the blessings of a mild and sunny winter as refreshment, payback for the heat and wildness of summer. But summer, oh summer, summer is God here. Summer is adventure. The true rejuvenation of spirit. Its dramatic contrasts, of thudding heat against the near orgasmic threat of cyclonic travesty, are the blood which thumps through us over these six months. Systole, diastole, dry heat, torrential salvation.

And so, I have a hole in my heart.

You have forsaken us, oh cyclone.

It's not that we necessarily want annihalation - yes, you came with Laurence before we'd had time to shift the calendar to greet you. You mashed a caravan park. You destroyed cows. You wreaked havoc on the unsuspecting and the unprotected before we'd had a chance to settle into your rhythms -but then you abandoned us.

Then again, writing in anger or self pity is never going to tempt you into our longitude now, is it? You always win the argument. So perhaps I should cajole you, tell you how we need and love you. Our backyard does, anyway, the local lopping company having quoted two kidneys to fell the many dead palm branches dotted around our place. You, oh great leveller of the north west, are our only hope. Sure, you'll be messy, but aren't kidneys important for something?

All this dry, dead air is sending me into a spin. Ironic, really. That's your job. But with Robyn faffing about somewhere in the middle of nobody cares where, nobody cares. We do though. We'll take your Robyn, or any STUVW you might cough up in the next 28 days. You know you're a chance. The meteorologists do even if you don't. They're still predicting, 'the possiblity of a cyclone by the end of April'. The clarity of vision is astounding. But, despite its hypnotic vagueness, the fact is, they're correct.

Patch up my heart and you will feed me until November. I need that here. Winter comes. It is long, blue, eternal and already we have lived under dehydrated orbit for near a year. Bruise our skies and stitch us up good before our blood runs dry, oh cyclone.

PS. I bought my daughter The Wizard of Oz to watch on your night of nights. You wouldn't disappoint a four year old now, would you?

Champagne Laughter

April Fool's Day has just passed. This marked the anniversary of my mother's death, now six years ago. Her final breath was a moment of survivors' glory for us all (not only her nearest and dearest, but even the most far away, including, I have no doubt, some random guy waiting for a train at Frankston Station). And even though the time, sometime shortly after 10pm, by far dodged the prankster's hours, it was surely a surreal gesture to Mum's life that her family were no less than cheering in the hours which followed. Indeed, by 2am when the night doctor finally arrived for his ash cash - oh yes, even certifying the dead has its perks in the medical world - we had champagne laughter flowing. The fond banter, the jovial reminiscence, the joie de vivre of kiddies at a float parade marking 60 years of memories. Myself? Giddy with joy and exhaustion. So worn by the delirium of a weariness I could have bottled and put insomniacs to sleep with for a lifetime. In occasional glances, daring the guilt of such happiness to join us for more than a passing second, we would check our smiles, our relief, and offer up a moment of intended condolence for anyone who perhaps, maybe, just didn't get the joke. Eyes which would momentarily claim, 'Of course. You're right. This is so sad. Beth's gone. And too early, too young.' But only a second. Maybe too, wiped out by another hopeless grin lighting up some corner of the kitchen and blinding us all again.

It's ok to think whatever you're thinking. Denial? Shock? Despair? Some random spot on that incessant web of a grief map no doubt. Or maybe you've been here? Into such a room: The warm space of a family kitchen worn by sorrow and grieving, spit polished with the resilience and fortitute of loving through the barrage of messy, interminable death plodding around them.

Before Mum died, not just in the final two months but in pockets of time over a few years prior to her death, the terror of her dying would wake me at random hours such as the ones in which we were celebrating at the tail end of April Fool's Day. If sorrow and grief stabbed me, as I contemplated her 'not being' any more, whilst she was still alive, imagine how cruel it would be to me after her death. The torment was regularly unbearable. I would lie in my bed become a pool of acid and knives. Stab and burn and mock and the grief burnt my tongue and eyes.

Daylight was always reprieve after my mind got the better of me in such moments of reflection. I would be dulled by the burning into a sombre, sober plod through the day. And it would, of course, be another day. One in which Mum was alive. And life was still hanging about, fiddling with its collar, stretching its neck, twiddling its thumbs, putting on these occasional acts of purpose, no matter how seemingly trite or insignificant. It was always, until the end, just enough to ward of death.

I had just turned thirteen when my Mum got cancer. I'm thirty nine now. So was she. Perhaps why I'll rejoice at reaching forty? Unscathed. In some bizarre sense, despite knowing I'm in an average life span demographic in the late 70s or early 80s, forty seems like success. Like, once there, anything else is a bonus. That's how it was for mum. Although she wanted to see her kids become adults and I was the eldest of three. She begged her God for a few years up her sleeve. She got twenty. Twenty years in and out of cancer, the last few insidious.

Of course, most of it is superstition, the whole thing about surviving thirty nine unscathed by one of mortality's little elves and I'm not particularly that way inclined. But if my mother could pack in the amount she did in the two decades she shacked up with her 'friend' cancer, jostling for space, determined to get along with this bugger, share the cooking, the chores, offer it suggestions as to where else it might like to live, then what's not to embrace with a healthy body and a begging heart?

I am still wondering when I will begin the sobbing. But there's only so much death one can grieve over, perhaps. Like crying wolf. When it finally came, expecting to be fawned over, it had already had its turn. Well and truly.

Pannacotta or Pannawonica

Is that the way you spell it? I've not actually ever seen it in real life. That delicate and curvacious blancmange of sweet purity. Pannawonica, the mining town, many times. Pannacotta, never. Last week I bought eight dairole moulds. I love the way little metal cups are glazed with the most delicate film of chill as they gain traction in the fridge, fortifying the coconut, the milk, the cream. Yet, never in my fridge. We don't usually do dessert. Well, we do. For our daughters' sake. Their idea of second course is a slice of honey on grain bread. The teensiest cup (almost trickery to call it a cup) of frozen berries. That's all it takes to deck the face, arms and relative bodily paraphernalia with the bloody purple drippings of blue or straw or black or rasberry juice. By bathtime, tribal warcries are upon us. 'More berries?!More be-rries!' by froggy legged white warriors bedecked head to toe in juicy oozings, lush, dark and ripe.
But that's it. I don't actually 'COOK' dessert. Didn't. I correct myself. Until a few weeks ago when I decided that, as I'm approaching the austerity of 40, I'm announcing to any available audience (mirror, swimming pool, sandpit, kitchen window) that I am going to begin dining us fine. Fine and dandy. Cordon Bleu fine. Fin. That is 'end' in French? Finished? And I hope it's not going to end for a while, as it's the release I'd not expected come witching hour. In fact, by aiming to do dessert, or to formally 'plate up and polish' everything from sausages to flour baked fish 'n chips, I'm actively embracing that which has become a chore. A curse into a blessing. A thief of time into a gift.
Nope. Not Poh (whoever Poh is). Not Ramsay (and no intention of going there). Not even Monica Trapaga (joining the excrementally insane list of B list celebrities to write their own cookbook.)Moi. Mummy. Me.
Eldest daughter again last night. 'So are there lots of people in the world with the same name?' My nod in reply. 'Ok,' she continued. 'Lots of people called K-?' A further nod. 'And E-?' Mmmhmmm. 'And there are lots of people called Mummy?' Wry grin.
So this person called 'Mummy' is doing something special. For doesn't 'cooking by a lady named Mummy' indicate a feast of regular meat and three veg, frozen fish and chips, boiled peas and carrots, sausages, poached eggs and baked beans on a Sunday night AND ALL WITH SAUCE?
Mummy is keeping her name, but sneaking in a good drop of remembrance of self (dissolved in a nightly chardonnay) and embracing her inner chef. She's cooking with love. Yes, for the family, but moreso for the lost island she swam from, with gusto, from the minute she entered her twenties.
Pannawonica is a closed mining town two hours drive south of Karratha in the north west Pilbara region of Western Australia. Along the way, one meets roos, moos and 'mus (Emus). Should one be blessed, none of these are flying at your windscreen at an unexpected moment. Pannawonica is down the road to the right, marked by a baby haulpak, the vehicular insignia of this region. A haulpak is large and yellow. Imagine a child's most favourite Tonka truck and put it on steroids for, say, a decade, then soak it in water so it bloats and bloats until it is then the size of a two storey building. This is a haulpak. I have driven to Pannawonica with my partner in a Holden Astra. It stood like a child's toilet step stool beside the grand machine. And it whimpered.
Note, I said 'baby' haulpak. The big mother haulpaks are Trucks By God. One might fill their buckets with the hose and convince people it's a luminous yellow, three storey swimming pool.
Pannawonica is the small haulpak of mining towns in this region. You live there to work. And when the work's done, you hitch a ride out on a haulpak, never to return. Workers can eat at 'The Tavern' and, among other holistic pursuits, might join the town library, the size of a matchbox and similarly jampacked with its heady literary wares. Or swim in the Panna pool. Bliss in forty degrees with a mere manly lifeguard to accompany your afternoon soiree. But it's the Tavern for me which defined my nights in Pannawonica. Namely, the evening fare. Yes, you can go serve yourself from the all you can eat bistro conveyor (I recall plenty of corn and cabbage and incredible salads and meats and gob sloppy, wonderful apple crumble). But what always did me in was the bruschetta. It would transport me. Virgin oil in more than medicinal doses, cascading through lush tomato chunks and the sweetest basil, garlic, seasoned just enough to save the arteries from final peril. Pannawonica, a la carte, would become my Italy. There was no reason, as I slurped and crunched my way through the heady deliruium of ripe flavours, I should believe myself anywhere else.
If bruschetta can do one's head in in a thickset, isolated iron ore depository such as the wonderful Pannawonica, then there's no reason I shouldn't be able to achieve the same a bit further up the road.
Guests for dinner this evening. Again, bombsite down the corridor. But, Pannawonica inspired, tonight is the pannacotta night of my dreams. And even should my dessert fail techinically, once I have my ingredients and have congregated my selves around the bowl, we shall be queens of the kitchen.