What I cooked last night.

She’s been gone what, seven, eight months? It seems only weeks since the disembodied voice of the nurse came through the loudspeaker in the car as I crossed a darkening ridge between Daylesford and Hepburn Springs in early spring last year. ‘She’s not here, again,’ she had announced, tired. I could only repeat that my 96-year-old mother’s normal pattern - did I say normal? - was to trundle her walker to Keilor Road, day or night, the clock can say what it likes, and then return. She always had. However, if absent at medication time, the attending nurse was obliged to find her or put in a missing report. That night had been in the middle of my three-day intermission in the long-running tragi-comedy of my mother’s last act, which had stretched out longer than I could have imagined into a kind of medieval tapestry, its frayed threads portraying faded memories; pale horses with flaring nostrils rearing at nothing; messenger angels posing as infants past; small figures with indecipherable ...

Everyone seems to agree that everything you can eat tastes better in pastry.  Obvious hyperbolic exaggeration? Or was it a television commercial I once wrote for a brand of pastry in the late 1980s? I can’t remember. Jump-cuts of a kind of dysfunctional, in a quirky way, not an angry way, family making pastries: pastry pies, pastry hot dogs, turnovers, tarts, sweet pastries with raspberry jam and custard and dried fruits; and on it went, a real weekend afternoon cook-up, flour everywhere, and an end-super over the vision reading: everything tastes better in pastry ; then a quick cut to a three-year old on the floor who has found a piece of dropped pastry and is wrapping it around a small doll and all you can see sticking out of the pastry is its hair and its winky eyes; and the super dissolves to the words: almost everything , and then the brand logo. Later, we had to re-edit the end of the commercial to add a still of the family eating their pastries around the table wit...