What I cooked last night.

Same place, same food, same kookaburra  This Christmas was  2009  all over again. Just fewer aunts and uncles. Fourteen years takes its toll.  And, of course, more children, including our thirteen-year-old.

A large panel on the front of the 500g pack of bacon proudly boasted: Smoked Using Australian Hardwood .  In tiny print on the back of the pack: 'imported bacon' . The majority of such bacon comes from countries subsidising their pork production, placing Australian producers at a disadvantage. (Importation also adds, for those obsessed by such matters, to carbon dioxide emissions; however those who care about this see only that Australia's net pig production emissions are thus reduced.)

The ninety-five-year-old does little cooking now, a notable exception her ever favourite supper. She fries two eggs, toasts two slices of bread, and enjoys eggs on toast surrounded by memory's ghosts, seated politely in empty chairs around her like Dickens’ semi-formed characters from A Christmas Carol. As she ascended the mountainous nineties, Edmund Hillary-like, she occasionally forgot to take her daily medications, suffering some kind of oxygen deprivation, ditto. The family, meaning my sister and I, appointed one of these franchise nurses, to visit and administer medication, nineteen pills morning and night.  The health franchise company soon decided that the ninety-five-year-old was at risk of also forgetting other things. Other things included turning off the gas after cooking eggs on toast.  The message (received) read:  we recommend you cut off your mother’s gas supply. This measure will mitigate the risk of gas explosion. The doctor disagreed. (The health ‘industry’ no lo

The ninety-five-year-old can still read, but likes to have someone read to her, especially four-point type cooking instructions in pink out of red on food packages, for example. Oddly enough SBS foreign language film subtitles are no trouble at all to her. She reads along perfectly but still has the sound at top volume presumably so the next-door neighbours can have a French lesson. A letter arrived yesterday. I read it for her. It was from an old friend in Germany; probably of a similar age, maybe a little younger, a mere octogenarian perhaps. The card inside was printed with a snow-capped alpine village scene and a greeting in a similarly snow-capped Jena Gotisch font which read:  und ein gutes neues Jahr .  'Dear Mary ...' the letter accompanying the card began. At some length the correspondent wrote of ' ... a weekend walk with my friend Otti in the Sauerland ... ' , and a page later, of planning a festive meal:  ' ... I bought two kilos of beef. I put it into a