Recipe time: Persian-style watermelon sherbet

I have no idea if they actually eat anything resembling this in Iran, or anywhere near it. It's just something that I came up with in an idle moment years and years ago. It's dead simple, looks beautiful, tastes amazing, what more can I say?



1. Get some fresh watermelon. About a quarter of a large one should be more than enough - that's how much juice there is in the bowl in the picture above.

2. Squeeze and strain out as much juice as you can. Make sure there's no seeds in it. Bung it in the freezer till it's frozen solid - there's no need to put it in an ice-cream maker or to stir it like you would with a granita, because you're going to shave it instead.

3. A few hours before serving, finely chop up some pistachios (peel them if you're really fancy by soaking them in just-boiled water and squeezing them out of their skins when they're cool enough to handle), some apricots, and (maybe at the last minute) some mint leaves. About a handful of each. Get a pomegranate and pop out all the seeds.

4. Make sure your watermelon juice has been in the coldest part of the freezer, and chill a separate bowl in the freezer well in advance.

5. Take it out and start grating it. This is the arduous part - I used to do it by ploughing into it with a fork, which is what I'd done in the photo, but you might be better off with one of those microplane graters. Even a cheese grater might do - the key thing is to make sure that your shavings come out cold and dry. Transfer them immediately to the chilled separate bowl - it will melt very quickly if you're not careful. If it's all getting a bit molten, put the whole shebang back in the freezer and let it refreeze before trying again.

6. You'll end up with an enormous pile of sweet, refreshing watermelon snow. Take your pistachios, apricots, mint and pomegranates and mix it all in, then add some chilled rosewater to taste. Serve it immediately - it will start melting within seconds.

Strange discovery this morning

The cat has been behaving more weirdly even than his usual self since coming back home. The day he got out of his 30 days' quarantine was particularly traumatic, because we had literally no furniture in the house and a cat's first instinct when it's in an unfamiliar place is to hide under something. I had to drop our car-share car back in its parking spot after getting him in the house, and when I came back he had completely vanished. After the usual frantic hunt through the house I realised that he had dragged a pillow from the end of the bed and squashed his entire oversized body underneath it.

This is how he spent most of that first day:



He's never been a cat for getting under the covers, but that night his fears got the better of him and, after a few fruitless attempts to tunnel under the pillows we were sleeping on, he slipped down under the blankets to the bottom of the bed. Now, whenever he gets the chance, he crawls into a little sausage-like parcel at the end of the bed and sits there very quietly. Especially if there's scary noises in the vicinity, such as children frolicking.

Anyway, I wasn't paying much attention to any of this until I was changing the sheets this morning and a little roll of paper dropped out. At first I thought it was just another bundle of receipts from furniture shops but on closer examination I found writing on the backs of the receipts, in a very small but rather elegant hand. I've spent a few hours trying to decipher it and at first I thought it was some sort of prison diary. But then I realised that the handwriting exactly matched Jasper's, and that it was describing not a spell in prison but a period in quarantine.

He's done this sort of thing before, so I wasn't overly surprised (while we were in Africa in 2005 he wrote a blog to keep us informed of his exploits). Anyway, I'm starting to transcribe it so I'll put up excerpts from time to time.

It's a little bit country...

My Christmas present this year from my lovely sis-in-law was a little pocket guide to "Sydney's hidden and intriguing places". That sort of thing is right up my street - just the thought of being able to brag: "I know the perfect place and it's just round the corner and you've never heard of it" makes me purr with smug self-satisfaction. Especially if I'm in a city where I've not lived for five years.

Anyway, such thoughts were going through my head as I got to the end of Adelaide Street the other day and dropped down into Cooper Park.



Ask most Sydneysiders about it and they'll tell you they've never heard of this 38 acres of never-developed bushland strung between the ponce of Double Bay and the bustle of North Bondi. Which to me is absolutely extraordinary.

In London, a treasure like this would be on the cover of every travel guide and filled with dogs, strollers and kids on bikes every weekend of the year. Think of it as Hampstead Heath with Jurassic tree palms, massive stringybarks corkscrewing their way into the ground, ghost gums surrounded by litters of peeled bark, and native birds sounding and whooping all around.

Because it's a steep stream gully, you can rarely even see the tops of the terraces and apartment blocks on the surrounding streets. Looking up through the treetops, you could imagine yourself in the Blue Mountains, or further afield still. Barring a bit of management and some work on the paths, this little scratch of land has not changed much since the days when the local Darug had never seen a European face.



For anyone who lives within 30 minutes' walk of Bondi Junction, the main transport interchange for Sydney's eastern suburbs, a walk through Cooper Park would seem an obvious way to work out the stresses of the day on the way home from work. But the strange thing is, the place was pretty much deserted on the three occasions I've been there so far.

Perhaps Australians are so used to being surrounded with genuine native wilderness that they become blasé to it when it's on their doorstep. But I can't escape the suspicion that the Double Bay types are too busy carving people up in their 4WDs, while the Bondi types aren't interested in any green space you can't jog through. There's a few tennis courts at one end of it, but I guarantee that visitor numbers would go through the roof if they knocked down an acre or so of forest and laid out a bland grass footie oval.

Anyway, I'm happy for it to stay that way. The second time I visited it was the week before Christmas, and I was on my way back from shopping for essentials at the massive Westfield centre in Bondi Junction. My backpack was full of drink and cat food and similar nonsense and it had been drizzling all day, but the weight seemed to disappear as I climbed down the mossy staircase into the gully. The spray fell in veils through the fern fronds and beaded on the leaves of the forest floor shrubs. A native magpie bristled on a trunk a few metres away, then unfurled its wings and dropped deeper into the valley. I felt nowhere near the city.