It’s hard to pick out the happiest of happy things but this is my list of 2025 highlights (excluding books – more on those later – and holidays, and I had some amazing ones this year, notably Hobart, Cambodia, New Zealand, and my sinkholes tour). Continue reading
01.Saw MTC’s delightful production of Much Ado About Nothing. The set was extraordinary. Continue reading
01. A crowd-pleaser for good reason! Lovely night at Opera Australia’s The Barber of Seville (and especially good to see my dear opera friend who I haven’t spent time with for months). Continue reading
01. Yay! MTC’s 2026 season launch. I was thrilled to hear Joanna Murray-Smith speak about her new play, an adaption of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. And cannot wait for the stage production of Forster’s A Room With a View. Continue reading
01. Festival is my middle name this week. The weekend was filled with Now or Never – Continue reading
01. So I probably haven’t shared the long and sad story of the demise of my book group… and I won’t now because of the title of this post. I also won’t go on about attempts to get a new group started… Instead, I was thrilled to be a part of Ramona Books inaugural book group this week. Such fun to have a really meaty discussion with people invested in talking about the book! (the book was Dominic Amerena’s I Want Everything). Continue reading
I just love a drawing room play, and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife offers all of the froth, ambiguity and sly humour that you would expect.
The story is relatively simple – Constance Middleton’s friends are aware that her husband, John, is having an affair with her best friend, Marie-Louise. The friends are busting to tell Constance but despite their broad hints, she is seemingly oblivious. Seemingly… actually, Constance has her own approach to extra-marital activity, and as John talks himself into a corner, it seems Constance is not quite in the precarious position her friends thought.
“Oh, my dear, you mustn’t be offended just because I’ve taken away from you the satisfaction of thinking that you have been deceiving me all these months.” Continue reading
01. The 2025 Stella Prize announcement. Yay for Michelle de Kretser and her book, Theory & Practice. Continue reading
01. Melbourne Food and Wine Festival is underway. We enjoyed an Austro-Hungarian lunch (that extended into dinner) at Cardwell Cellars. Highlights: the flammekuechen, the wines by Werkstatt (especially the riesling sekt), and the gingerbread kugelhupf, which were out of this world. Continue reading
01. An early RISING announcement and it could not be better – Miranda July! Mini-golf! Flinders Street Ballroom! (image) Continue reading