We are having a lazy day today –

I know it seems like everyday’s a holiday in Stellouland, but you try carting a wriggly three-year-old around town all day, keeping curious little fingers out of your food and away from all manner of breaky things in the shops, you try entertaining a small and quick-moving creature who can’t stop nattering and asking questions, and then come and tell me about your holidays –

So you see.

We are having a lazy day today, keeping close to home with comics and fashion magazines while outside the crickets are keeping up a steady, hysteria-inducing chant into the hot, hot afternoon.

Our Saturday jaunt to Haberfield with Deborah yielded, among other things – among mini cannoli and veal ravioli and a rose ganache in white chocolate – a handsome lump of burrata, this yielding, cream-filled ball of mozzarella made fresh at the cheese factory. This was lunch this afternoon, sliced and plated with small, sweet tomatoes. We mopped up the peppered-and-salted olive oil with chorizo-and-red-pepper flatbread from the bakery up the street.

Oh, Haberfield: Two buses south and west of us, Haberfield is good for girls with a penchant for pleasure-seeking. In the deli-drogheria on Ramsay Street, Italian mammàs stipulated strict cuts of meats and cheeses, while on the corner, in Pasticceria Papa, the coffee cups clinked on their saucers and the shopgirls served up chocolate biscuits and ricotta cannoli and gelati in green and swirly pink. These are treats that feed a bout of girltalk. When Deborah gently chided her absent fiancé for leaving the toilet seat up, I said, “It could be worse – he could be a ladyman.” “A ladies’ man?” she said, laughing confusedly. “No, no,” I said, “a ladyman.” Saturday sweet-tooths swirled around us like aunties in a Toa Payoh hawker centre, but we’d found ourselves a table for four and we are ladies – even the kid, who was on the floor playing with her tractor by this time – who like a sit-down.