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The fridge packed it in over the weekend. At first it was a vague awareness that things seemed a bit warm, maybe the door had been left open. But by morning there was no doubt, it was warmer inside than out.

You think so little about fridges until they go wrong. They’re so solid and reliable. Sitting squatly, chilling. The hum in the night as the cycle keeps it rhythm, the accompaniment of insomnia. The opening window to contemplation of undiagnosed wants and needs. The treasure chest of good things, new things, temptations and treats. Boxy, white and always there.

But when they go, it’s a sudden surge of action and prioritisation. The rapid decanting of the soon to putrefy food stuffs, the ringing around to find additional cool stores at friends, relatives and neighbours, the investigation of the gloop that has accumulated in the nooks and crannies of the shelving, the butter compartment, and that have dropped to the bottom of the freezer and are now unidentifiable.

The man will come soon, so like whipping around the vacuum before guests, swiping on some lipstick, I’ve busied myself cleaning every shelf, every surface. It’s the most sparkling under-performing white-good around. Though perhaps it’s all futile. I suspect we will soon say our farewells. But now that that’s done and I await the my fridge’s fate, I can’t help thinking fondly back on our lives together.

My fridge was my first major household purchase. Nothing seemed to say ‘grown-up’ quite as much as spending hard earned dollars on white goods. Ah, the memories, the trip into Harvey Norman, considering the volumes, prices and efficiencies and fending off the salesman. Signing that hire purchase agreement.

My Fisher & Paykel took pride of place in the kitchen of the first flat that my now husband and I moved into together, our cute little second floor apartment with Harbour Bridge glimpses.
I loved that fridge, with it’s upside-down-freezerness, it’s white shiny exterior and inner gleam. Bought in the pre-christmas heat after a week of sour milk I was all the more appreciative of the invention and proliferation of home appliances. I positively cheered it’s ice making capacity.

My fridge has loyally followed us through numerous houses since. Up stairs and down. It waited patiently in storage when we had no place to put it. It survived the rough treatment of a band of pirate furniture removalists who scraped and dented it, and forever after set it to a slight incline that required propping.

It’s chilled Christmas hams and curry pastes, breast milk, bottles, purees, custards, cakes and leftovers, medicines and I suspect its held the same container of miso paste for some years now. I’ve let it be dribbled on with knocked over jams and tipped over bloody mince. The twin vegetable compartments have been soiled, grimed and survived. It’s been part of every family occasion in it’s own semi-silent way.

We’ve been together ten years, now. It’s been showing it’s age for some time. The bottom has been filling with ice rendering the fruit and veg compartment useless for that purpose. The ice grows glacial, creeping to the edge until the door hardly seals. The ice has to be hacked at, sometimes lifting as a single two foot wide piece. Almost every shelf has cracked. The fridge door regularly won’t shut properly, the seals splitting. External plastic bits drop off, like falling rocks on a cliff face..

And I’ve been disloyal. I’ve muttered at its small size, less suitable to a family than to a couple. I’ve shoved things in, forced doors open, shut, in and out. I’ve contemplated it’s replacement before now.

After all it’s all I could expect. Ten years is good in fridge-years these days. I’m sure under the powerful florescence, the hyperbolic musak, the chatter of the store I will look upon the crisp clean and new styles, the featured and glowing with enthusiasm and imagine a new life with an appliances. For the fridge is part of the lifestyle dream, the holder of so much more than food.
Alas my poor fridge. Now so still and quiet. Time to take down the magnets, pull off the notices, the drawings, the take-away menus, the last fond farewell.

When the wind turns chill and the nights come early I get an urge for warm, sticky desserts. It doesn’t bode well for my thighs, but it’s happening again. 

Usually I get the idea in my head about an hour after dinner, sticking my head in the fridge looking for something extra to eat. Then when that doesn’t work I’ll start flicking through books salivating. That then leads to a dash to the supermarket at ten minutes before closing to get the extra ingredient I’m out of, just another small part of the obsession.

I’ve been going through some of my older recipe magazines, many that were once my Mum’s, and was quite delighted to look more closely at New Ideas for Delicious Cakes and Desserts (An Australian House & Garden publication, Margaret Master, Editor ). I can’t say exactly when it was published as it doesn’t say but it cost a $1.00 and I’m guessing it’s from about 1976.

Seventies recipe magazines were almost all in black and white, which makes things cooked in syrup look somewhat unappetising. The addition of colour however, didn’t necessarily improve things, as everything seems to be yellowy-brown, from the upside down apple torte to the hazelnut coffee cake. There was a bit of a fashion for coating the outside of things with cream and crushed nuts in the 70s too, particularly iced apricot soufflés in the case of this magazine so even that looks nutty brown.

But you can easily get past this by just getting excited by the curiosity of it – all the things you don’t eat much these days. Some for good reason, if anyone ever did eat rice fritters, which appear to be fried batter-coated milk-rice sprinkled with coconut and cream; that can’t be good for you.

Last night I became fixated on golden syrup dumplings, hardly a dish likely to get a heart foundation tick. They’re quite heavy and very sweet.  Basically the dumplings are made of a stiff pudding batter simmered to puffiness in sugar syrup that reduces to a fudge. The raising ingredients give them a bit of lightness while the outside absorbs lots of golden toffee sauce. Serve them with ice-cream and you’ve got a pudding that will keep you in a deep comfy chair for some time.

They’d be better I suspect if the butter and sugar were creamed together instead of being rubbed in, to make them a bit lighter – an experiment for next time. Or I have to get better at rubbing in, and learn from master scone bakers to make the method work better.

The night before last my dessert obsession took me to Crepes with Orange sauce. This is a classic that should be brought back. Crepes are really easy, if a bit time consuming.

Margaret Fulton taught me (Margaret Fulton’s Kitchen Hardie Grant 2007) that the reason you should make the batter half an hour before is to let the starch swell. Which is odd as the crepes turn out just as well with gluten free flour.

I used the last of a quite sour orange juice in the sauce and it was delicious. And have since poured it over crumpets for breakfast too,(it’s like a rindless runny marmalade – yum!). For the true 70s effect these really should be flamed with warmed brandy but for every day eating a sprinkle of Cointreau adds all the decadence you could want.

Golden Syrup Dumplings

DESCRIPTION: A heavy batter made of self-raising flour with butter rubbed in, to which you mix in an egg and a bit of milk that is cooked in spoonfuls in sugar syrup for about 10 minutes without a lid and another 7-8 minutes with the lid on. The batter is then raised and fluffed, turning golden on the outside and like a steamed pudding on the inside while the syrup reduces to a fudgy topping. Best served hot with ice-cream.

For the syrup is:

• 2 cups of water
• half a cup of sugar
• 2 tablespoons of golden syrup, but its bloody difficult to measure
• and a knob of butter, a couple of heaped teaspoons

Dissolve the sugar and golden syrup in the water, melt in the butter then bring the syrup to the boil. Use a sauté pan or some other pan that is wide, flat and has shortish-sides and a lid, preferably. Something you might make risotto in. 

Let it come to the boil while you mix up the batter but if you’re taking awhile to get to that bit add some extra water as it will reduce a lot more as the batter cooks and might burn or become toffee if it gets over cooked.

The batter is:

• 1 cup of self raising flour
• pinch of salt
• 30g butter (1 oz or near enough to a tablespoon)
• an egg
• and 1/3 cup milk, roughly 80mls

In a bowl, sifted or fluff the flour with a pinch of salt. Most store bought flour comes sifted and only gets lumpy when it’s been sitting around in the cupboard for six months or its really humid. Sifting aerates the flour, removes lumps and mixes the ingredients together well.

Rub the butter into the flour, which means squeezing all the large bits of butter into the flour with your fingers so that as you keep squeezing and mixing it becomes grainy and ‘bread-crumb’ like. You don’t want to melt the butter with your hands.

Make a hole in the yellow grainy flour-butter mix, crack in the egg and the milk. Stir this around so that there are no lumps or sloppy bits and it’s all mixed together smoothly but is still thick.

Drop teaspoonfuls of the batter into the syrup leaving some room for them to spread and let it bubble away for about ten minutes. The dumplings will expand a bit and the syrup will partially evaporate, thickening and becoming darker. Cover it to reduce the evaporation and make it a bit steamy and cook another seven or either minutes.

Transfer them to serving bowls with a slotted spoon and pour over some of the sauce. Eat them straight away with big blobs of cream or custard or plain ice-cream.

Crepes with Orange Sauce

Thin pancakes briefly warmed and soaked in orange syrup so they become a bit soft and absorb some of the flavour.

A basic crepe batter is:

• 1 cup of plain flour
• 1 teaspoon of sugar
• a pinch of salt
• an egg 
• and 1 cup of milk mixed with half a cup of water

Crepes are meant to be thin, so they don’t use raising agents and the batter is runny. 

In a large bowl whisk together the flour, sugar, and salt. Make a well in the flour and crack the egg into the hole with a little of the milk. Swirl the egg and milk gradually eroding the flour and incorporating it, adding a slops of milk as you go until all the mixture is smoothly combined. Allow to stand for half an hour or so.

Wipe a crepe pan or non-stick frypan (about 20cm across) with vegetable oil and heat over a moderate flame. Pour in approximately a third of a cup of batter and quickly swirl to evenly spread. Watch carefully, when the mixture starts to form bubbles that plop like lava, flip and cook the other side for a couple of minutes. Transfer to a plate and fold in half then in half again to make a kind of quarter circle, and keep warm. Repeat with the remaining mixture.  This should make six to eight crepes.

Orange syrup:

• 1 cup orange juice
• 1 cup water
• long strips of orange zest if desired
• a few teaspoons of Cointreau, Grand Marnier, Drambuie or other liqueur to serve if desired, crushed nuts might also be nice.

The syrup is made by simmering the orange juice with the water, and zest if desired until you have one cup of syrup, what is usually referred to as reducing by half. It will take about 10 to 15 minutes. The zest adds some extra zing and texture.

Once all the crepes are cooked, return them to the pan and pour over the sauce. Allow to simmer gently until warmed through, then serve a couple of crepes per person with some of the sauce, and desired accoutrements of liqueur, cream or ice-cream. 

Today Sunrise, the Channel 7 chirpy breakfast television show posed the probing survey question, ‘do you use the wok-burner-thingy on your barbeque?’ (http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/b/sunrise/1184/kochie-real-men-dont-use-wok-burners ). The suggestion was that it was an unnecessary bit of over-packaging, and of course, such deep issues need discussion and analysis.

The discussion that followed suggested that it was a wifely domain, while the blokes did the important meat turning tasks, real men don’t wok apparently. Images of backyards around the country set up as catering production lines for smoking and tossing food came to mind, along with bickering and elbow knocking and tomato sauce on the toes. I didn’t get back to the show to find out the final result of the poll, maybe it will be on tomorrow. Leaving aside the gender issues, I felt more bemused by the universality implied in the question, that everyone has a barbeque with a wok-burner.

Not being the owner of a barbeque, let alone one with a wok burner thingy I felt somewhat put out by this question. I’ve long felt something of a consumer pariah for not having my own indoor/outdoor patio lifestyle area. Now I feel underprivileged for not having the barbeque either.

I confess to drooling over Barbeque Galore catalogues admiring large shiny barbeques with five burners and griddles and wok burners and thermostats on the roasting lids. They’re the Hummer of home entertaining, the lifestyle statement barbeque, and that much grunt and shine has a hefty price tag (anywhere from moderately expensive to astronomical), incorporating the levy for Acquiring Lifestyle Envy (ALE), the ‘gee what a big barbeque you’ve got’ appeal. So discussions on the marketing differentiation and add-ons that keep piling up, like wok ring size enhancements leave me holding the packed sandwiches from home in the outdoor entertaining stakes.

I’ve often looked at the wok burner and thought goodness, wouldn’t it be interesting to toss the vegetables outside, but then the thought follows but why would you? Apparently, many people who buy them have the same issue, thus the survey. Preparing the vegetables, transferring them outside, tossing them with the sauces and then serving them up seems a process that requires benches, an often under-acknowledged cooking requirement, plus the sink and easy access to the pantry and fridge. Hence, not that much fun out of doors.

The wok burner may be the barbeque equivalent of the microwave programmable casserole buttons, I know of no one who knows how to use all the functions available on their microwave or who has shown much interest in the discovery. What a job that must be, to think up functions that no one will try using? You have to ask yourself what are you going to use your barbeque for? And the answer is generally to burn sausages and steaks, especially if men with beers are left to do it.

Until this Sunrise question was posed I hadn’t even considered how many of these barbeques must spend most of their lives under the black vinyl cover on the outdoor entertaining area gathering the gritty muddy dust of the elements. Though a few seconds contemplation made this seem obvious. Loved for a summer and then left in the rain, wheeled out summers after sporadically, after the glow of new ownership has waned. Like so much stuff we don’t need, and hence don’t use it sits as statement to our excesses. Well, for some, otherwise where would the envy be?

So, while the question initially made me feel even more marginalised from 21st Century life after due consideration, maybe its okay to not have a barbeque with a wok burner in my life. Though I still think the thermostat roasting covers are cool.

Tomorrow Australia will vote on whether to give Kevin Rudd a promotion or to keep John Howard in the job. I have never felt so confused about an election. Not that I am undecided, I have no doubts about my own convictions, but I’ve no idea who will win.

All the polls have consistently predicted a huge Labor win, but when it comes down to the seat-by-seat wins necessary it doesn’t seem clear at all. There have been plenty of Melbourne Cups where the favourite hasn’t seemed even in contention on the day.

I’ve come to accept that I have a very limited understanding of the Australian people. I never understood how Howard came to govern in the first place let alone how he’s managed to stay there. He has long appeared to me a person of poor character, someone who has white-anted his way to the top then ruled with an iron fist, a brutal agent of his own self-interest. Yet apparently most Australians see him as a wise leader, sturdy, dependable, good for the country. Clearly I am very wrong.

Nor do I hold to the view that he has managed the economy well, if anything I believe we have been disastrously led. Private debt has sky-rocketed; the labour market has been radically fractured and destabilised; asset inflation has run rampant warping investment direction and driving financial circularity rather than building future growth and sustainability in the economy; the resources boom has been squandered just as it has saved us from otherwise mediocre performance.

Rather than seeing the country as in an economically good position I see it as precarious. With record low unemployment, interest rates and inflation; asset values rising as if there were no limit, and all around us wealth and prosperity? It’s the undertow beneath the sparkling water we need to look for. Whoever wins is going to have to tackle global instability and recession. Which is why the sudden change of tack in the election campaign does have some bite. I’m not the only one who thinks it’s all about to go down the toilet.

And I see just as many people ‘relaxed and comfortable’ for whom it truly is ‘all good’ as I see those obviously straining, stressed, fearful, alienated. Australians now work harder, accept greater burdens without question, are more cynical, stressed, and afraid to admit their concerns, their fears and insecurities. Yet seem muted. And I don’t understand the dichotomy. Is it a quixotic dream?

I so want John Howard and every miserable bastard on his front bench thrown out of office. I believe the Howard era will come to be seen as a time of lost opportunities, of pig headed, scandalous waste. But a hatred of Howard doesn’t automatically flow to a love affair with labour.

As a technocrat, an ambitious manager, Rudd embodies a politics of corporate culture. Not a change of government so much as a restructure and the promotion of a new CEO, a minimal impact choice. There are important differences of methodology rather than ideology. Even so the promise is that within the framework of steady as she goes, some things will be acted on, some better outcomes will be achieved. I want to believe it will be different I’m prepared to overlook the similarities. But it doesn’t feel like a fresh wind of change. I don’t even get the feeling that many people like him. They just don’t like the other guy more.

At times through this election I have had the sense that many people are yearning for the opportunity to vote, to tell someone what they really think. And I have a sense that they really care, even if they are only muttering under their breath. The trouble is I still don’t know which way they’ll go.

Open this book just to dream of tropical climes and holidays. My copy is showing how addictive this can be after six years as the insides slowly peel away from the well-thumbed soft cover. But what better compliment to a cook book that getting used.

Annabel Langbain is apparently a bit of a New Zealand celebrity though none of her TV shows have managed to get across the Tasman and she’s relatively unknown in Australia. But who cares, she writes fab food. Unlike the glut of pop-culture chefs her cooking is genuinely fresh, simple and inspiring.

The sections follow a Pacific day, breakfast to lunch to pre-dinner drinks, mains and desserts. Ranging from exotic and expensive like lobster and quail to the everyday like spicy pork meatloaf or curried eggs it’s can be dipped into for all sorts of occasions and budgets. Unsurprisingly given the pacific emphasis it concentrates on seafood and fish, and the flavours skew between India and south east Asia. The cocktail style h’orderves and appetisers are particularly good, like vegetable pakora, duck and mango rolls and cardamom and coriander spiced fish sticks. A bonus is the cupboard recipes at the back for everything from chilli jam to asian barbeque sauce and the scrummy mint and ginger pesto.

This was the first place I saw wonton wrappers cooked into crisp serving cups, in this case to serve shredded duck with cucumber and a tangy tamarind sauce. But a few years later wonton cups seemed to pop-up everywhere. I can’t prove it but she seems a cook ahead of the curve.
The layout is engaging, peppered liberally with beautiful pictures by Kieran Scott. It’s square shape makes it easy to keep open and the text is clear enough to read when your hands are in the midst of squishing something. Plus there are no weird font size changes or distracting italics.

Savour the Pacific is a terrific cookbook for anyone who loves tropical flavours but is also for those wanting to try something a little exotic without too much effort.

Savour the Pacific: A Discover of Taste
Annabel Langbein © 2000
An Annabel Langbein Book
The International Culinary Institute Press Ltd
Available from Amazon.com or www.annabel-langein.com

Dench bakers is quintessentially North Fitzroy, a mix of rustic and modern, refined punk, glamorous grunge, which is to say grown ups pretending to be young, and the young pretending to be grown up. It combines organic bread and baked goods with coffee, the home-style that no one has at home anymore.

Display cases are filled with escargot and chocolate croissants, banana cake, bee-stings, and brownies. They serve breakfasts and lunch, from granola to prepared paninis and sandwiches of in-vogue ingredients like bresala and provolone with tomato and salad; roast lamb with cranberry, chilli and plum relish or the simpler mayo lathered tuna and salad. Eggs come poached or scrambled with extras like bacon, avocado or mushrooms. There’s French toast, plain toast, filled or plain croissants savoury or sweet muffins. Specials might be a duck and shiitake risotto or a goats cheese and prosciutto omelette.

Breads sit on exposed frame shelves, dark and burnished, dusted in loose flour of creamy whites. There’s brioche, spelt, olive and walnut, foccacia and ciabatta, raisin and stone, most around $5 to $6 dollars.

Minimal colours and décor give the feel of being inside a panorama box that could be hosed out after a big night. The floor is marble composite, walls are exposed white-painted brick, arty photos hang well framed, a plump flower arrangement looks out the window. The ceiling is half painted boards and a plaster box hiding electrical cabling that can’t get inside the walls. An inexplicable large alfoil dolphin hangs over the entrance. Down lights are suspended from wire tightropes. Noise echoes: staff chatter, blues, jazz or whining folk, clunks from the open kitchen at the back. Distressed wood tables and panelling combines with grey metal, cool and warm.
There’s style and effort being taken. Glasses of water come unbidden, table service is attentive and easy going, not overly fast or slow. The staff are friendly and colourful in personality not dress, all wear black t-shirts.

Customers sit at compact tables along the wall or at the window bench looking across to the Piedmonte’s loading bay and scungy terraces where herbs and bright flowers thrive in pots. It’s not a group venue. About twelve can sit inside and about the same take up positions under red Genovese coffee umbrellas outside close to the Scotchmer traffic belching in sporadic flows. Solo readers and note takers contemplate over coffee. Groups of twos and threes, with prams or dogs, chat as likely dressed in overalls as Sass & Bide jeans.

And if you don’t want your home-style out, there’s a selection of home-style meals and dips to take home.

DENCH Baker 109 Scotchmer Street, Fitzroy North VIC 3068 +61 3 9486 3554

Piedmonte’s supermarket is something of an inner city suburbs icon, an easy to access got-everything store, tram-line and parking out the front, central to the North Fitzroy shopping strip.

It has an old-worldy atmosphere, in that the building is sort of 60s and the signage isn’t too flashy. Dust and flies linger on window ledges and it feels like not much has changed in decades. The roof inside is high above, thanks to the mezzanine upper floor, climbed to on wooden stairs where a non-digital photolab and shelves of tupperware, household goods, and party goods gather dust. A coffee shop and nut bar are seemingly never occupied yet continues optimistically. But downstairs is in constant motion, six to eight cashiers will be whipping the streaming customers through from early morning to late night every day of the year.

Wafts of fresh baked Turkish bread and roasting chickens drag you in. A dog’s almost always tied up outside and there’ll be a slightly dishevelled busker. Bikes cling to anything solid and the Big Issue seller shouts “Echh-shoe” somewhat incomprehensibly and you’ll later see him browsing the fresh pasta.

It’s a supermarket that has to straddle some of the poorest and richest residents of inner Melbourne, as well as the diverse range of ethnicities. You can pick up imported French creme fraiche, organic ice-cream, peking duck, fresh fish, puy lentils, fresh pasta sauces, wiltof, baby spinach, Maldon sea salt, toilet paper, lettuce, bananas, lamb chops, fresh foccacia, dutch biscuits, or just bread and milk. The deli is well stocked with hard and soft cheeses, olives, antipasta, dips, salads and salamis; and excellent smoked bacon. The eclecticism makes it a haunt for the curious, but just confuses and bewilders the uninitiated like a spiders web. It takes work to walk out with just the milk you went in for.

In summer its chill is a relief, while for the rest of the year it brings on a shiver. The dairy case aisle particularly needs thermal wear. Sunny weekends bring in the picnickers grabbing extra beer and dips before heading to Edinburgh Gardens, during the Grand Final there’s hardly a soul around, service is quick on Cup Day around three too. In winter its lighted footpath comforts the tired and homeward bound commuters. Best avoided Sunday evenings when seemingly everyone in the surrounding area runs out of milk. In spring the fresh jonquils by the door and brilliant yellow daffodils distract and bring on impulsiveness.

It’s an interesting place, but all supermarkets have an element of interest, it’s the subtle differences that get us through homogeny.

PIEDMONTE’S SUPERMARKET
Corner Best and Scotchmer Streets, North Fitzroy +61 3 9481 1600

Watching swimming lessons as though underwater fully clothed in a large chamber of blue. An oppressive, audio soup that defies concentration, the mind sinks in steamy air strewn with hypnotic blue and white flickering. Splashes, children shouting, teachers shouting, parents shouting, crying, squealing. It’s a warm, sloppy, sleepy place intended for the undressed. Which is why most of the mother’s perched on the long bench seats around the toddler pools resort to child rearing banter, day care fact swapping, and toilet training tips, all higher cognitive function is suppressed, or maybe that’s just motherhood.
The three pools a constant chaos of reflected broken light, stretched with royal blue lane ropes, everything unnatural toned to aqua. There’s a paddle pool, an oblong kids pool about 90cm deep and a 25 metre pool with lap-lanes and ramp access. The huge circular lights above are unneeded today in the ambient yellow of a warm spring day that comes in from three walls of windows. The high roof curves in architecturally metaphoric waves, no doubt intentional.
Outside the 50 metre pool attracts the serious, the lappers, the one piece brigade, caps and aerodynamic goggles. The landscaped lawns are crisping the prickles nicely for summer. The café chairs on the deck lean at half-mast to drain the dew while inside a group of grey haired women occupy five tables for morning tea having aerobised in the pool.
A primary-school tsunami, forty strong surges in, overwhelming anything stationary in its path. Children strip while in constant movement, chattering, comparing costumes and technique, pile their bags and move on like locusts to form rows as though iron filings compelled by unseen forces.
Multicoloured goggles bob up and down on wet round heads, kick boards flick out of the water like frightened fish. Large prams are parked along the narrow edge, mobiles chirp, babies breast-feed or sleep.
“Rainbow arms.”
“Safety entry”
“Kick, kick, kick, that’s it, straight legs.”
“Head down.”
Toddlers and their mums take their first swim lessons, scrambling over floating rubber mats with glowing faces, going ‘shopping’ for floating toys and doing the hokey pokey.
A bored life guard stares into space while around him the confident, physically-fit stride, the overweight waddle, and the gestating move with aching slowness. A group of retired men gossip in the spa, alternating with the stream room, bathers too small for public display.
Bits of rice cracker expand in a puddle by my feet. My head beats to the doff doff doff of a child churning water with their feet.

Aquarena Aquatic and Leisure Centre, 139-153 Williamsons Road Doncaster
61 3 9848 1300
http://www.aquarena.ymca.org.au/home.aspx

Well, almost a year has gone by and I haven’t updated this blog. It’s been that sort of year. 2007: the year of health and hospitals. I always thought I would write a lot about my health problems but when it came down to it, it was too close, too hard. But in retrospect I might be able to write something.
In summary, I was diagnosed with the kidney disease, IgA nephropathy in 1997 and over the following ten years my kidney function has slowly deteriorated. In March this year my results showed I was heading into the steep part of the exponential curve that kidney deterioration generally follows and my specialist expected I’d need dialysis before the end of the year, possibly even by June. We lived from month to month after that, watching the numbers go up, down and bounce around. I had a fistula operation in late April that failed because my veins were just too small, and then in June my mother suggested she be tested to see if she could be a donor. By July I was trying to mentally prepare myself for PD dialysis (I’d attended information sessions at the hospital and at the home dialysis service) or a transplant not knowing which would come first. Then in August it was confirmed that my Mum was a suitable donor and the operation was arranged. Six weeks ago we both underwent our operations at the Royal Melbourne Private Hospital and the transplant was successful. Everything is going extremely well. After ten years of wondering and certainly six months of preparing, I skipped needing dialysis completely. I have a new kidney, a renewed energy and a new perspective. So much for excuses, I hereby promise to post more.

Welcome to fionamackrell.com.
This site will look like its going through one of those make-over shows over the next few weeks as I try to get a handle on how to make the best use of my blog in an over blogged world.
I am the mum of a three year old, a wife, a student, a freelance writer and muse. I live in Melbourne, Australia and my burning ambition is to finish the novel I’ve been writing and make it something worth reading and publishing.
On this site I will show some of my work from very short stories to novel extracts and feature articles, as well as rabbit on from time to time on the oddities of modern living, ethics, politics and economics that catch my attention. As a keen cook and aspirant travel writer I will also share reviews and comments. I hope if you stumble in here you’ll find something to enjoy, giggle at or feel moved by and that it will inspire you to visit again.