This will hurt me...

Hungry? Bellerive Wharf, Bellerive. September 2010. Book Club Friday again already. I finished two books this week, one Vietnamese and the other Swedish (although very much Finnish is tone and content). The first was Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War . Apparently quite popular in Vietnam enough to be banned – this one is a mediation through the Vietnamese War (the second one) from the perspective of a North Vietnamese volunteer. Think of it as a shorter, more disjointed Vietnamese version of The Thin Red Line . Now, I am not sure if it is a poor translation, or if the Vietnamese lyrical style simply doesn’t translate well into English, but this one was a little disappointing for me. The overarching story was remarkable, and many of the vignettes themselves were compelling and nicely drawn, but the stilted, exaggerated and overly florid description does wear you down after a while. I am not sure that the overly elaborate and shifting narrative also helped. While I appreciate an unreliable ...

One of Henry's most favourite things in the whole wide world is "dinner outside". Here in Tasmania, "dinner outside" equates to "dining with seagulls". Thus, the other evening, we headed on down to Bellerive beach and feasted on an array of scallops, prawns, squid, blue grenadier, dory and chips at the world famous (well, it is now) Fish Bar . We ate in the shadows of the light towers of the magnificent Bellerive Oval (home of the 2006/7 Sheffield Shield winners, the Tasmanian Tigers) and under the watchful gaze of a gang of seagulls that were loitering about. Which brings me to Theme Thursday . I got the IMPRESSION that the seagulls were up to no good. The cynosure appeared to be a battered scallop (or perhaps it was a prawn), and despite my warnings to Henry and Ezra to avoid encouraging the winged-rapscallions, an imbroglio ensued when a stray chip found itself on the grass next to us. You can imagine the commotion. In fact, in the subsequent kerf...

These fish have undoubtedly seen better days. The orange fellow in particular seems surprised at his predicament. Henry and I took this snap at the fish mongers at Mures Lower Deck . There is a cruel beauty in the fact that I live in a place that has the world's greatest seafood , and I'm not much of a fan of fish. That said, a nice bit of squid, octopus and the odd John Dorey, and I'll be right!