
How to make Grace
How to make Grace DM 20th December 2025 The twenty-first of December in Australia is called ‘Gravy Day’, by virtue of Paul Kelly’s famous song
The kids all think they’re cool with their sing-song ‘six seven’ – glad most of all, for the way it annoys adults. They seem quite unconcerned that the little phrase is beyond definition. Just glad that it ticks the boxes of an inside-joke and gives them some sense of power. Derived from a rapper’s song about the height of a basketballer, in the old metric system of feet and inches, it has become a rather whimsical expression of ‘whatever’.
Kids in every generation have their six-seven’s. In mine, it was 42, the answer to the ultimate question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Except unlike six-seven, it came with the other side of the equation, that the question, said its author, Douglas Adams, is six times nine, meaning that life is meaningless. It doesn’t add up. It was an existential cry again the senseless mess of the world.
There was once a lady at a well who had come to draw water. She strikes me as a bit of a six-seven type of girl and a woman whose quick-lip would have probably enjoyed the 6 x 9 = 42 humour. After a number of failed marriages – she was on her ‘sixth’ – she was tired of men and weary of life. But there He was. Sitting at the well. With no dark humour nor crude put-downs nor suggestive remarks. Just love. Just truth. Just life. No wonder she traded her worn-out jibes for his life-giving hand.

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