I should be dead. I should be in the ground along with well over a hundred of my dearest friends and millions of others consumed by a global catastrophe that began in the early 1980s and continues to ravage many parts of the world. But I'm not. I'm still here, alive that is, and having lived through the peak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, I felt compelled to tell my story. I wanted to share with my 12 nieces and nephews why I wasn't around much when they were growing up. I didn't want to fade into history, lost like a whisper in the wind. In Dads old photo album I see a distant relative from 100 years ago, a face with some recognisable features, and I know nothing of her, nothing of the history, of the life, and that absence of information creates a small void in my own life, a face without a story, a family tree missing a limb. I lived through a war, not the conventional kind with guns and bombs and grenades and trenches, but one just as lethal. I watched most of my friends suffer gruesome deaths during the HIV/AIDS War, and many of them are now all but lost to history, faces on an old photo often cut out of the frame by their own families, falsely declared dead from cancer or some other disease, their memories tainted by lies and shame. Then there's my story. As I laid down my memories and examined my history, I looked for a thread, something that unified all parts of my life: the good, the bad and the ugly. In my case, the Case of Greg Kelly, food has threaded together all facets of my life: career, family, friends and history. The recipes in this book aren't a list of ingredients and cooking instructions. They are memories. They are history. They are meals shared with those that I've loved and in turn loved me. They are the culinary expressions of events happening at specific times of my life. Greg Kelly: chef, restaurateur, carer, volunteer, radio presenter, community welfare worker, letter writer, gardener, bad actor, performer, demonstrator, and all round shit stirrer and now author.
