01. Dinner at Solarace by Chef David. Apart from the actual space being over-the-top fabulous, the standouts were cod with tomato, lychee and avocado fancy bits; abalone tempura that was out of this world; and a wild rice salad that was so good I just wanted to put my face in the bowl (which I couldn’t do because we were with friends and standards and whatnot).
02. Leslie Jamison was in convo with Rebecca HarkinsCross as part of The Big Anxiety. It was a fantastic discussion about storytelling as part of wellness, and Jamison said that in deciding to tell her own story in The Recovering, she realised that she had heard a lot about drunk (white male) writers but hadn’t “…heard much about people getting better, or making art from getting better.” She went on to discuss her experience at Alcoholics Anonymous and said that “…it is a community where storytelling is central… I always thought that the prime imperative [of storytelling] was to be original…recovery was the inverse of that. Unoriginality didn’t doom us, because it was about shared experience…”
At the end of the conversation, Jamison stressed the value of re-reading, noting that memory is not static – “We can’t ever know the ways experience will allow us to reconsider or re-encounter the past.”
03. Cried through The Princess documentary.
04. Fun Melbourne things on the horizon – gin and views.
05. A visit to the oak where I collected the acorn that is currently sprouting in my acorn vase. It is a huge, magnificent tree and we happened to visit when it was flowering (I hadn’t seen this before. The ‘flowers’ are called catkins).
06. A bunch of things I’m loving: Strangelove tonics (obsessed with the Coastal and the No.8 tonic); the four-cheese lasagna from That’s Amore (I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that you can only get it at their factory shop…); and a decent facial sunscreen that doesn’t cost a bomb.
07. Latest edition of Gourmet Traveller (the Restaurant of the Year edition is always my favourite).
08. Finally! S3 of the Derry Girls has landed in Australia.
Enjoy Derry Girls! I laughed, I cried, I still adore Sister Michael (whose full name is revealed and I think you’ll approve 😉 )
Ah, Derry girls. Never easy to finish a show, but the writer Lisa McGee did a fantastic job. Few tears and lots of laughs. I’m currently reading ‘Factory Girls’ by Michelle Gallen which is from the same period and very much in the spirit of DG, scabrously funny.
“Storytelling as part of wellness” is an intriguing idea. Yes, why can’t we use storytelling as a tool? I think we can and do.
You’ll need tissues for the last Derry Girls episode.
Thanks for the tip off about Derry Girls!
Im still laughing thinking of your face in the rice salad. Your blog always makes me happy and yes to swimming in your recent review.