You could call this bangers and mash

Locally grown, home cooked - delicious! Cotechino made by a friend from a local free-range pig. Lentils grown just to the north of us at Mt Zero. Lentils with flavour! Nicola potatoes grown just down the road by Mt Warrenheip.  

Not a glamorous photo, but we were hungry and couldn't hang around fiddling with a camera. Autumn is a wonderful season for greedy people.

One hour

Last night.

 Autumn rain, no cars on the road. Earth Hour Ballarat.

This morning the road is noisy with cars going to church.

What did you do by candlelight this Earth Hour?

It was dark well before seven so I turned the lights off early and played by candlelight.

Earth hour in the forest.

A harpist plays by candle light.

A witch drinks from her gumnut goblet

A forest spirit comes by to listen.

Unstitching kimono

I have just had the best couple of hours, sitting by the sunny front window and unstitching an old silk kimono.

peacefully starting the transformation of an old garment into a quilt.

Loving the the silk sheen in the changing light as clouds pass by

Heaping up folds of rich silk

Thinking about how to use the different textures and colours

Undoing carefully the careful stitches set by my predecessor in the fragile lining silk

Admiring the stitches before I pull them out

Silk rustles in a quiet room

The stiff and the fluid silks let go of each other

and float to the floor

The Master

This week in a secondhand bookshop, I found The Golden Bowl, one of my favourites by Henry James and long missing from my shelves.

I also found The Master, a novel about Henry James by Colm Toibin.

Generally I avoid 'faction' but I picked this up and was entranced. I've read both books in tandem, over my four silent days. 

The Master manages to convey briefly but intensely  the novelist's whole life and character, by focussing on just four years late in James' life, and extending them through reminiscence and  memory. It isn't primarily a fictionalised biography. It is an exploration of  how a writer writes out of the grief and terror and sorrow of his life - and of the disciplined life of observation and work lying behind the novels.

I'm trying to reread my favourite James' novels, picking them up second hand as libraries don't seem to keep 'the classics' any more. Henry James gets a lot of criticism for his detachment, his long, stylised sentences and his occasional obscurity, but time and again I pick up a new book and find it is a reworking of one of his.

Happily I haven't quite finished The Golden Bowl and I'll still be reading it tonight.

Aren't blogs lovely?  I can't go off and have a coffee and chat about these books, my throat's too sore, but I can chat here. 

Rose-scented apples

After several uncomfortable days I feel lively and hungry again. I'm still voiceless though, this virus is a tough one. We went to the Farmers' Market at Buninyong - heaven on a sunny autumn morning!

We found figs, quinces,  marmande tomatoes, delicate pears just about to ripen fully, rye bread from Geelong.

Walnuts, sundried muscats and apricots from Mildura, sugar gum honey from around Newlyn, the last little red radishes, lettuce, fennel, and giant white Chinese radishes from organic growers near Warrenheip, local eggs and bunches of basil.

And many kinds of apples. Cox's Orange Pippins, Snow Apples, Gala and a beautiful new variety, Prima. This is apple season, and I can get my apples fresh from local orchards. Apples with flavour, each variety distinct.

The new Prima apples (new to me) taste and smell of roses. I knew that apples and roses are related, now I believe it.

Shopping

And after silence there is shopping.