THE ART OF FINE DINING:

I remember Graham Wood was there & some Tomatoes, but
I don’t remember why or where. Four shots & two beers
seems like a tepid night out, I’m guessing we must have
been tired at the end of a long day – an exhibition or
a seminar? There’s something coming back to me about
Graham that night, something not quite his usual self,
or maybe I just had the ‘dark head’ on. He’d left the
Bear costume, the Drum & the Nightie back in Blitey.
My recollection was of us transitioning into a ‘less fun’
phase, like a heavily laden truck dropping into a low gear
for an infinite incline. The cuisine would have been
‘expensive’, that’s for sure, it was the 90’s, we were
surfing a wave, fuelled on still growing global popularity
& a fragmentary knowledge of fine dining which resulted in
obscenely large dining bills. These I look back on now as
documents of a performance art satirising the excesses of
minor celebrity & the first whiff of distance between us
& the dole.
Leafing through a photograph album of legendary nights
on the lash I’m shocked to note we look twenty years
older than we do now. Glad I’ve still got them all as
friends, still working together, still got that fire in
the eye – congratulations to all who sailed on that ship
& survived.

(K)