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Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.

Having and not having the cake

Everyone involved in Bake Off is always lovely; and that everyone involved is always lovely to each other I know my girlfriend credits with having helped her through the hardest months of her life, so I guess I owe it that as well.

Easter cakes

I find I cannot cry on the day of the funeral or for many nights after the news of Ellen’s death and it is as if I am stunned by this loss, as if I am too close to this absence for it to mean anything yet, until two weeks later when I take the handle of the mould in my hands and lay the flat back of it against my cheek, and I cry and I cry.

Finding the fundamentals of culture

Valuing a job that creates something tangible is probably why, on leaving school, I opted to become a chef; I liked the idea of making food, and hopefully making people happy. It’s probably why I farm, because doing something physical, to produce something you can actually touch, is wired into me.

Dried milk

THE RUIN OF the new mother is the raspberry. I give Yasmin, her eight-month-old, the bursting prize of the red...

Heat and hope and attention

Rules that were once rooted in religion have settled into our insides as secular, self-imposed rules about ‘good’ food and ‘bad’ food and, by extension, ‘good’ bodies and ‘bad’ bodies.

Eat me in the city

The idea of having my body lovingly prepared and cooked as a feast for friends seems like a particularly beautiful death to me, and one that needs careful planning and consideration.

Red heart, red ship

When I was twelve years old, I was head over heels in love with a little red ship, the Danish polar vessel Nella Dan. She worked for the Australian Antarctic Division for twenty-­six years, and in the 1980s Hobart was her home away from home.

White day dreaming

We linger together well past bedtime, talking of our children. The sun plays its part by refusing to set, doing an orbit around the horizon and waltzing shadows across the lounge. Below us are about eighty metres of ice floating on the waters of the Ross Sea. Further towards the mainland and buried some sixteen metres down in the ice are Scott, Bowers and Wilson, frozen into their sleeping bags and wrapped in their tent.

Leading down south

We were using the Italian station as a jumping-­off point to inspect some of the nearby stations – the German Gondwana Station and, for the first time, the Korean Jang Bogo Station, as well as China’s temporary station on the site of the proposed new Chinese station planned for Inexpressible Island in Terra Nova Bay. This is a truly remarkable part of Antarctica...

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