Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: obesity

  • like there’s no tomorrow

    I’d like to say I’ve been baking but the truth is, only about half the mixture ever hits the heat. Last night I made a self-saucing lemon delicious with around one third too much butter and sugar, so that I could eat the butter sugar and lemon mix off the back of a wooden spoon. The night before it was apple tea-cake, creamy and satiny in the bowl. I started with a bullied gingerbread recipe, almost every spice within reach crammed into it, including black peppercorns and cardamom pods which I ground down in a pestle, just so that I could lick the mixture off the back off a… well, you get the picture. I mix, I grind, I beat, I slurp. Then I pour the remainder into a tin, put it in the oven and walk away. The rest of the household have to monitor, test with a straw, slide it out and serve it, and then the next morning I find crumb-clung baking tins stacked in the sink half-filled with water. Either I will turn into a human sofa and have to turn sideways to enter a doorway, be unable to leave the house and eventually fill it with my lardlike balloons of flesh, or I will die young of a preventable illness, or I’m soon going to have eaten so much cake mix I will never bake again. Damn you, red clothbound bachelor cookbook with your enticingly pineapple-ring-lined black and white recipe illustrations! Damn you, free range eggs!

  • great barrier grief

    I feel so ashamed and disgusted and frightened at what’s happening in my country. The inhuman way the world’s oldest civilization are treated. The lack of generosity towards people needing help who arrive on our shores. The decision to dump dredging waste from the expansion of a coal port within the National Park created to protect the world’s largest living organism, the Great Barrier Reef. The carte blanche offered to quick-buck miners who gouge what they can from our ancient resources – I’m including forest-strippers and tree-pulpers here as ‘miners’ – at the cost of sacred sites, irreplaceable rock art, and whole mountains which have withstood millenia but crumble before the dreary dollar. The cars stoked with air conditioning in which we transfer ourselves from one over-stuffed mansion to the next. Malls filled with landfill. Food which is hardly food, young people’s beauty marred by the treacherous marbling fat that comes from addiction to additives and inactivity, trans fats and sugar. We are so rare and beautiful and our earth, on whose surface we are still a minority, exquisite beyond words. There is more microbial life in a teaspoon of soil than there are humans who have ever lived, all counted together. My heart is sick and heavy and I don’t know how to drag us to the point where how we live remembers that.

  • sun crema

    Sunday. Drive down to the beach. Past all the worlds. Seaworld, Dreamworld, Movieworld. This tiny horseshoe strand was a favourite of mine. Now to get to it you have to round a dozen roundabouts: long miles of wilderness which now are smooth resorts. At the mouth of the bay a smooth cafe stands. It is full with people in smooth shoes and clothes. The irons have entered their souls. Only a few dozen are on the beach itself, or in the ocean, the water and sand rough on their skin. Years before, the beach would be full, the cafe empty. As we come down the hard-trod beach bridge with our feet scritching the yowling hot dry soft sand a girl comes up past us, body folded round her swimsuit the way a skin forms on sour yoghurt, smooth youth creased and jiggling like old age, her eyes down, her thumb ardently scrolling the smooth glassy surface of the palm-sized computer which gives her a mirror, I suppose, of who she is on this wildly sunny day on this hidden beach between the shaggy headlands and behind the smooth cafe. She has bought a lifetime season ticket to Phoneworld. She is never alone, but she’s always alone. Oblivious and knowing behind her the surf brings in its trays of crema.