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It began with a boast about gravlax.'What's that then?' asked Emily.
'It's where you take salmon and you cure it in your fridge on a bed of rock salt (maybe with a bit of vodka too) and you serve it up with rye bread and cream cheese and dill andlemon and radishes and it's delicious. We used to gravlax a whole salmon every Finnish Independence day, and another one for Christmas lunch.' 'Ooooh! Sounds amazing. Tomaz loves seafood - can we make some when he visits from Slovenia?'
So this week, I brought together four facets of the life we used to lead, in the charismatic-but-falling-down house in Abbotsford: finnish food, good food and wine (we opened a 1998 Allsaints Marsanne - and it was a bit old, but yuuuummmmy!), a place where friends can come and just 'be', and a space where being a 'citizen of the world' is all that counts. The challenge was to put together a three course meal that had a seafood theme to all three courses. The gravlax entree (in the UK they call it a 'starter') was the easy part.
From there we moved on to a seafood risotto ('king' prawns were recently on sale at Sainsbury's - the mostly-english dinner guests all oooh-ed and aaaah-ed about the size of them, but they were soo little compared to even the ordinary prawns we get at home!) and that amazing Marsanne.
Then came my cunning piece de resistance: Guylian chocolate seashells floating on a 'sea' of mousse. The original plan was a chocolate mousse, but a week ago I realised that everything except the mousse was on the 'safe' list of a friend who is on a really insane allergy-testing regime (fish, rice, certain veg, lemons, dairy stuff as long as it's 'on the side). And apples. So I found, and followed, a recipe for a baked 'apple mousse' and it worked a treat! (More visions of all those feasts where, without batting an eyelid, we planned medieval feasts for 100, where vegans, coeliacs and even 'people who don't like onions or mushrooms' could all eat to their heart's content).
So we ate, we drank, we conversed until late on topics from here to the moon and round all the known stars. Thank you Emily, Tomaz, Brenda and Tess. I don't know why I let myself get out of the habit of evenings such as this.
I feel more alive than I have in years.
One of the things Mikko has missed out on in a big way is the resurgence of his beloved St Kilda football club. One of the few teams to have won just a single premiership - and that all the way back in 1966 - he adopted them because his Australian family, the Colquhouns, were all Saints fans. (I do hope they were allowed to keep the jersey they gave him for his 30th: they weren't sure about the gift idea when I suggested it, but he 'fucking loved it'.) And together, Saints fans back their boys through hard times, and only slightly less hard times, year after year.
I personally reckon there was something about the Saints that made them beloved to immigrants: I'll not forget going to a Saints vs Blues match once with 4 belgians, the Finn and one other Aussie, and only the locals were barracking for Carlton.But I digress. Again.
Apart from the great Nicky Winmar, who was a genius on the field, and off-field both an advocate for Aboriginal rights and, often, a 'messed up bloke' (Mikko's greatest heroes were always people who were battling adversity - witness the late great Hunter S Thomson - and he both admired, feared and wanted to emulate them), Mikko's other St Kilda hero was the club's elder statesman, Robert Harvey. Sometime captain, dual Brownlow medallist, a veteran of 383 games over 21 years, 'Harves' has seen everything but a premiership cup.
The lads gave everything to get him one this year: at 37, he didn't have another season in him; but after winning the pre-season NAB Cup, running a typically up and down season, then surging into the top four in the last week before the finals, they fell at the last hurdle to Hawthorn, who at least went on to win on Grand Final day. There's no shame to losing to the top side all season, but I know Mikko would have been bitterly disappointed at the result.
Maybe today's news would have brought a smile: Harves has been voted by his peers throughout the AFL (and a big margin!) as the AFL Players Association Madden Medallist: an award established in 2007 to recognise the game's greats in the year of their retirement from playing. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke.
Harves has now joined my beloved Bluebaggers as Development coach, and I somehow don't think the Finn would mind me now sharing his favourite. When our teams played each other we could hardly stand to be in the same house, much less go to the game together (one of us always ended up sulking, no matter how generous the winner was), but when our teams played someone else, we always knew who we were barracking for!
It began with a boast about gravlax.
