Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category Leisure

  • Salsipão

    A BEER AND A pie at the football was once the Australian norm and tradition, with sausage sizzle as the alternative and substitute for local matches. But now we, in both respect to multiculturalism and market service to gentrified crowds, do better. I went to see Sydney FC defeat Jeonbuk FC in the Asian Champions League (2) at Moore Park Stadium, and ate salsipão with my craft beer on tap. My goodness what a world of glorious sport we live in. True to my dinner, Diego Costa scored.

    • Chorizo, barbecued and chopped up
    • Chimichurri
    • Cherry tomatoes
    • Fried onion

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  • Chilli

    A HAPPIER BLOG ENTRY with no unpleasant surprises, nor native animals. This is simply the chilli recipe. You will need to light a camp fire. Begin at 3pm to 4pm: this is a key element to the process. First, let the fire get hot, then cool down a bit so it's plenty of coals and a little bit of flame, not too much. Warm up your camp oven or cookpot.

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  • Lizard

    COOKING WHEN CAMPING INTRODUCES certain challenges. You're away from your usual kitchen, you have to improvise with less, it's hot or cold or maybe rainy, you have to manage a fire, and every now and then, if you're in Australia, a large lace monitor will wander through like the bully of the town, to a Morricone whistle. (You'll have to provide the ocarina yourself).

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  • Whirlwind

    SOME HOLIDAYS ARE ABOUT taking one's ease. Some holidays aren't, and I have just had one of the latter. To go and see the 2025 Women's Ashes I decided to travel the hard way to the MCG from Sydney, all in all 2,495km in a scenic loop, on a motorbike a bit too small for touring. Why? Why not?

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  • Romance day

    THE FOUR DAY WEEK is both an attractive demand and a realistic utopia, an acheivable measure any of us could feasibly gain, and with it, improve our lives. But wait! Our society’s totalising culture of shouting-productivity and management will strike back with demands of its own:

    “Managers need to be comfortable that these hours are being used for that particular purpose (of passion) and not to do chores, or to work on your own little start-up [or] business when not explicitly stated,” she says.

    Absolutely no. We can all imagine the kind of management where the tradeoff for a four-day week—or any other arrangement of increasing leisure—is increasing intrusion of management onto recreation time. We’ve all heard of the (in theory) rather nice arrangements where software developers in major firms are given company time to work on open-source projects; we all know about lawyers and professionals working pro bono. This isn’t that, this is colonisation of private time. One person’s ‘romance day’ of fulfilling tasks and self-actualisation can so easily turn to HR measuring those things against firm profitability. Clocking off should be exactly, and completely, that.

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  • Parcel

    ‘YOUR PARCEL HAS BEEN delivered and is waiting’ reads the text message. The parcel locker system is one of the best recent innovations of the public sector; instead of having internet-ordered things delivered (if you’re lucky) to your house, or more usually, delivered to a post office open 9am–5pm, you get a six-digit number to your phone to open a secure box in the wall. It’s like a PO box but without the costs or size restrictions.

    This package is from Japan, has camera parts in it, and is—I hope—going to be the difference between my having a working camera and an expensive shiny paperweight. The model of camera has been out of production since 1972, and the company has long since shut, so it’s a wonderful discovery to find that there are still people in Japan making and selling things like shutter ribbon, and replacement coverings. Hooray for enthusiasts.

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  • Rations

    ON SATURDAY 22nd I was part of the NSW Bush Search and Rescue (BSAR) Navshield, from this year an event organised by the NSW State Emergency Service (SES). It’s like a rogaine, or orienteering, only more so. One of the policies of the NSW SES is that its volunteers are fed on training and operational activity. We were offered, and I, out of curiosity, accepted, a Ration Pack, promised as equivalent to those issued to the Australian Defence Force.

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  • Detail accounts

    BECAUSE ONE BLOG IS never enough I started recently taking photographs of, and making commentary about, architectural vents and grilles. It's an extremely niche and (I hope) harmless thing to do with my time, and seems to fit what I realise is a broader interest I've got in other people's projects of documenting specific urban environmental characteristics.

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  • Morning Coffee: Post-Work

    ROUTINES MATTER. MY GRANDFATHER could roll and light a cigarette one-handed, without spilling any of the tobacco from his pouch. My own morning routine involves dismantling and refilling a stovetop coffee maker, which I’ve discovered I prefer even to someone else making me a coffee at a shop, in a much better machine. I think my grandfather and I—apart from respective addictions to habit-forming substances—share a taste for ordinary rituals of making and busy-work. Disassembling, washing, refilling and heating the machine does a wonderful job of occupying time and activity while I wake up, and it’s not the same if I just hand over $3 for the same drink in a paper cup. I can well understand the dilemma of the quitting smoker, who asks herself or himself, hanging desperately out for a denied cigarette, never mind the actual drug, what am I supposed to do with my hands?

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  • Shakshuka

    DIFFERENT RULES FOR DIFFERENT times of day are symptoms of a subtle tyranny. Humans have always obeyed the sunlight, getting up and going to sleep with the light, but it’s the modern city of workplaces and—and, though it’s a subject for another time, public transport—that has forced us all under the oppressive rule of the clock. Up in the morning and out to school as the song goes, we’re creatures of punctuality, routine, and the habitual regimen of the time-of-day, more self-disciplined to the hour than Medieval monks ever were. Even the most notoriously time-bound workplaces of all, the watches of sailors on board ships in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were enforced by relentless explicit violence and compulsory drug abuse. Like proper post-Foucauldians on board the Inner West Line train to work, we get the discipline without the fun.

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