Living here would be good.

Julie posted some lovely old windows and a  house in Woodend she'd love to live in, and I thought about a place I'd like to dwell in for a while, up the hill, just along this street, at the edge of the old part of Daylesford town.

It has a door that opens right on to on the pavement, and it's two stories high with a wraparound verandah frilled with with lacy iron work. It's big enough so that one room could be left completely empty. Always.

I'm such a townie - I love old provincial towns. Got to have a library and cafes and shops and a couple of people and a dog on the street as well as the occasional hour when nothing is happening anywhere you look.

Look at those huge old shopfront windows - I could sit there with the dogs and piles of books and sewing and pens and paper and coffee and wave to the world occasionally, even ask it in for a cuppa.

And just a step away the is the best old postbox for the daily crop of letters.

And look, the place is a bit battered, so I wouldn't have to live up to it, I could just live in it.

Rose riot

Birthday roses

Roses plonked in a jar

A ring of red roses

Over-the-top roses.

Welcome summer!

Summer roses

After a burst of envy for autumn pleasures of halloween parties and bonfires, I went out into the garden this morning and was overwhelmed by the scent and colour of the roses. They have loved the alternate days of rain and warmth this last week.

The fat buds of this rose darken to a black-red and the flowers have an rich perfume. I don't know what it is as I've grown it from a cutting, but I call it, a bit prosaically, my cooking rose. I make a beautiful rose sorbet with this rose, and it makes an intensely rose syrup that goes well with custards.  When it's cooked it turns a grey-purple, but after it cools or is frozen it becomes a deep and glorious pink. There were enough blossoms on the bush for me to pick some for the house. Last year I made delicious almond-meal cupcakes glazed with its pink, rose-scented icing.

My yellow tea rose is covered with buds too. I've tried to use this rose in syrups etc but its cool scent and its rich yellow colour don't survive the cooking process. It does, however, dry very well and keeps its colour and scent in a pot pourri.

No Halloween here tonight, alas!

When I was a child in Melbourne I'd hardly heard of Halloween, but we had an equivalently anarchic, magical, night time celebration. To celebrate either the attempt, or the failure of the attempt, to blow up Parliament a couple of hundred years ago in London, we Aussies would spend weeks gathering fuel (old chairs, tree branches, etc) for huge bonfires in our backyards and in the streets. It was Guy Fawkes Night, on November the 5th, imported with parliamentary government from England.

Please to remember,
The fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot 
This was one childhood chant - possibly abbreviated from something longer and political.

Children accumulated fire crackers and sparklers and catherine wheels and rockets for a few weeks beforehand, and long before the real dark, the crackers - little crackers and huge bungers - went off everywhere, filling the evening with deafening bangs and gunpowder smoke with that most enticing smell.

Bad boys put crackers in small childrens' pockets and threw strings of penny bungers at them to make them run. More socially-adjusted teams of children devised very dangerous and satisfying explosions as group efforts.
In my street, one year, we children set off enough cracker power in a carefully dug tunnel in a vacant block of land to send clods flying all over the adults' street bonfire. It was stupendous. A great deal of shouting and adult recrimination followed. That explosion took a week of planning, pooling of crackers and secret digging. And I bet none of the others involved have ever forgotten it either.

When it was really, truly dark, all the rockets and catherine wheels and sparklers threw coloured stars and fountains of red and silver and golden lights up in the sky above the crackling orange-red bonfires. One notable year our family contributed driftwood from a beach trip to the street fire and amazed everyone with blue-green flames.

Of course the mayhem with the magic meant that over the years children were deafened, blinded, and had hands and faces damaged until, finally, the state government banned all firecrackers. The bonfires became fire hazards. Guy Fawkes night disappeared, and is now mostly forgotten here.
I miss it.

When my children were growing up I revived a bit of that bad and beautiful night magic by having Halloween parties to celebrate my birthday (which happens to fall on All Saints Day just after Halloween). We had adults and children telling creepy tales late around a  bonfire and cobwebs and pumpkins and candles and weird birthday cakes. Everyone dressed up and occasionally we went down to the creek by candle and torch light and launched empty egg shells and paper boats for the goblins and witches to sail home in. (I don't know where that one came from - my boys invented it). We also burned magical  letters in the bonfire. (I think that came from the paper offerings the children saw Yin's family offering on ceremonial occasions).

Now the children are grown up and away, there will be no magical, fiery shenaningans in this house - and anyway the bushfire season has started early. I 've been reading all the posts of happy halloweeners with a lot of pleasure, and just a little envy. May you all enjoy the magic tonight.

PS I know this post is dated the 30th October, but my posts are always dated the day before they are actually posted - don't know why. Am I on Atlantic and not Pacific time? Anyway it really is the last day of October right now, right here. And it is summer, not autumn, for me.

Old house by the park

I've called this the old quince house for ages because the man who lived here used to give me quinces from his huge tree when I came by in autumn. Now the house is sold.  I hope the house will be fixed up. It could be a lovely place to live in.

The old chimney looks fine for fires but the roof needs some care.

looks like the iron lacework around the verandah got stripped off a while ago

But the old verandah is still a great place for a table and some chairs

Now there are leaves on the trees

Things are on the move

The sale sign is gone and the letter box is ready for letters again.

Hard patchwork

I took some piccies of the textures of  stone and brick on Wednesday.

This is a bluestone building on the corner of Mair and Lydiard Streets. I like the appliqued motifs.

I love the way the stonemasons left the block surfaces textured - there are some bluestone buildings where the surface of the blocks are flat and smooth. I prefer this.

Quilts are made of blocks, and the best (for me) are constructed of patterns, repeating motifs that can satisfy or tantalise the eye.

And now I must make some quilts with ghostly doors in them, just like this one in the Gallery lane walls.

or this one

Electric Shadows

A Chinese term for film translates nicely into literal English as 'electric shadows'. I went to see Julie and Julia yesterday at Ballarat's Regent Cinema (and only cinema). I had a very good time. I had fun taking photos of walls and roofs in Camp St. I sank happily into the film which celebrated  writing and books, sex, France, New York and FOOD. A charming fairy tale.

I have spent the rest of the day and today thinking about some some of the shadowy sides of blogging and writing the film just hinted at. That was good too. I like to be provoked as well as entertained.

Since I enjoyed Julie's blog when I read it - after she'd finished, as I'm always a bit behind the times - there's a link to it in the title of this post. Love the magic of the computer world, and I wish I had the time and patience to learn to work it properly. And cooking too. Meanwhile, isn't this just the proper place to see a film?

And on Saturday I'm going to see Ponyo.

Now I'm off to supervise the making of ricotta.