Simply perfect

This photograph is from the luxury pullout from the Weekend Australian Financial Review - the magazine aimed at impossibly rich people which I often scoff at. ( I could not remove the heading - sorry - I'm not a Photoshop expert.) But I just thought it was gorgeous - well striking anyway - and then I started to look at it more closely to try and decide why.

It's actually much more artful than just chucking a few sardines on a plate and pouring over olive oil. Those grains of, doubtless expensive, salt are arranged just so, the sardines themselves are equally spaced. Do you think they used a ruler? And the one with the most complete tail is in the middle. Interestingly, although I thought from my first glance that the sardines faced (if you can use that term) alternatively right and left - in fact this is not the case - it's just the bottom one that faces the other way. It's the right/left spacing that alternates. So what's the significance of the one facing the different way?

And apparently that's not olive oil - it's olive leaf oil!!! Now here's the thing. When I looked up olive leaf oil I found a lot about olive leaf extract and its miraculous health benefits - some of which might actually be real though it's too early to tell. But I could not find any olive leaf oil - except a thyme and olive leaf fragrance oil. So I'm not at all sure where he (Josh Niland of St. Peter in Sydney), gets it from. Which, of course, is why it is in such an extravagant magazine.

You, of course, might find it all very ordinary looking - but I just thought it was the perfection of simplicity. Encouraging you to think that you could do that too. Although I bet it's much, much harder than it looks.

It's a bit like a Picasso drawing we have on the wall (a print thereof, not the real thing), of a woman's bottom. There are just four lines in the drawing, but it's beautiful.

My grandchildren look at this and say, "I could do that! What's so wonderful about that?" But of course they probably couldn't. Just like I probably couldn't arrange those sardines on the plate.