I received, in the mail box, a letter from my dear Niece who is working in Shanghai. She loves it, although, having spent most of her life in London, and now with still a very pronounced English accent, China is quite a shock and on such a huge scale. She does note that she lost 5kg of weight in one month which she attributes not to specific dieting but rather to having diarrhoea for a month. She is very happy to have lost the weight. She is getting a real idea of the huge human scale and impact of mainland New China and is deeply fascinated by it all. I must write back to her. I have been waiting for her postal address for a few months, I still have a letter, unposted to her, from when I was working in the clinic in cairns and had no idea we would be moving to Melbourne...so this old letter, when posted with a new one, will be a bit of a 'time-capsule' in itself. I have no memory of what is in that letter. We write with fountain pens and use elaborate good writing paper, and seal each envelope with a proper red hot wax seal. I still recall that some letters I wrote her could never be posted because applying a hot wax seal to an envelope, for the novice, occasionally leads to a significant desk-fire. Fortunately, my old wooden desk is up to that challenge, scorched in its centre, and has survived well enough.