Old Lady Laughing

Deadlines all in a row

2012-02-09T13:35:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been stressed. I know very well what stresses me. It's absurd, and I can't stop it, but I can recognize it and do my best to settle down. Early nights, exercise and ticking off the to-do list help.

When too many obligations stud the calendar, that's what stresses me. I'm programmed to do one thing at a time. One enormous problem is not an issue: I can handle that. Show me a terrorist or a book to write by Friday, and I will cope on automatic pilot. Show me a calendar with 50 deadlines and to-do tasks, no matter how small, and I crumble.

Right now all is well again. Aaah... When stress lifts, I feel an electro-chemical change surge through my body.

We are nearly half-way through February and I have been ticking DONE beside small items and large. It even helps that three of my to-do things will be over by Sunday night.

Tomorrow, a rehearsal for our role in the Chinese New Year show at the TSB Events Centre
Sunday, the performance
Sunday, an open home for Novella, the apartment I'm selling by private sale.

Odd: as if nearly done is done.

And as if stress is a computable arithmetic progression. Now I'm working backwards. March is equally busy, and in April another progression will begin. It's all logarithms, I suspect. Or logarhythms.

This pattern I cannot blame on age, as I recall spotting exactly the same pattern in my thirties, when I began to perform in public.

What stresses you, I wonder?

Of dancing and books

2012-02-09T13:17:00.001-08:00

Last night I went to Dancing in the Wake, a 3-person, 4-performance play by Jan Bolwell with much creative input from all involved.

It was terrific. Unusual in that dancing by Sacha Copland (inspired, demonic, confronting) is welded seamlessly into a literary script (hilarious, rich, shapely).

I say literary with reason, for with Lucia Joyce, her father James and Samuel Beckett as the central characters, how could it be otherwise? The play created a big buzz afterwards, even for an opening night. Insights into the works of Beckett and Joyce abound, but they emerge from the action: nothing didactic, do not fear.

Inspiration bubbled up in our group of dancing grannies. We found an excuse to spend more time with each other in future: we will start our own dancing book club. That means, I think, every couple of months we'll have dinner together and then—yay! Each granny will dance a book she has been reading. Or a chapter. No pressure and purely for fun.

The first book I interpret in a dance will be The Information by James Gleick. Probably Chapter 3, celebrating the miracle of logarithms and Charles Babbage's doomed attempt to create a computer in the age of steam. Bring it on!

So Jan read a book and created a play built around a dance, which inspired us to unite books and dance in another way. The wheels turn.

Advice to a 20-year-old

2012-01-05T14:03:00.000-08:00

What advice would you give to your 20-year-old self? The Listener asked some prominent Kiwis this question and plenty of good advice was forthcoming.

But now the time travel problem pops up: what if your young self actually took that advice? History would be changed. Then you would not be quite yourself as you are now.

In real life I happily dish out buckets of advice to young people, confident in the knowledge that they'll absorb any advice that they happen to want at that moment and nothing else. (Just like you and me.)

So I won't tell that child bride a thing except what I'd say to anyone younger. If they choose to hear me, so much the better:

'You are perfect just the way you are. Be kind, be happy, be yourself, do your best, have fun and have adventures.'

Which is pretty much the message I got from my parents, bless them.

Fional Kidman's mature short stories satisfy like novels

2011-12-11T16:31:00.000-08:00

Fiona Kidman writes with 7 decades of wisdom and skill.

The 11 stories in The Trouble with Fire are wholly satisfying. They range wide and deep, and weave in and out of each other so that one could surely not feel cheated, as sometimes happens with short stories. On the contrary, by the end of the book I felt as if I had lived several lives in several other skins: The Trouble With Fire is as rich and complete as a fine novel.

Fire smoulders and flares here—in peat underground, in a pine plantation, and on the tussocked hills of Lady Barker's sheep station. Obviously, these images epitomize passion that flickers or rampages through the characters' lives. Delicately handled, they're as subtle as the rose petal cover art.

Fiona Kidman is a model of maturity. She knows how people behave: her characters respond to the twists of life in ways that are not rational or predictable, yet seem inevitable. Kidman meets, observes and follows her characters, sometimes through decades.

Her eyes are sharp. Her memory is long. Her words are simple and clear, sometimes lyrical, always layered. Experience has made Kidman wise but not cynical: she retains a fascinated compassion for ordinary people living their lives as best they can, despite extraordinary challenges.

Enjoy these stories. They're a great way to find out first hand why Fiona Kidman is one of New Zealand's most revered authors.

Mortality? Stuff it!

2011-11-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

It's about two years since I started this blog. Slightly bewildered about turning 70. Feeling some vague responsibility to accept and understand how old I was—even to believe it, that would be a start.

This odd urge to become conscious of my chronological age was stirred up by the strong memory of my mother's choice: she always swore she didn't want to live past 70, and she duly died before that self-imposed deadline.

At this point, I say stuff it. I have tried. I will never be a Buddhist monk. And I've gone back to living my funny little life with no more age-awareness than the next person. Today I feel about 41, a sprightly 41.

I meditate and do Tai Ch'i and I've lived with tea masters in Japan. So I understand—theoretically—the idea of coming to terms with one's mortality. My friend Maja Milcinski used to lecture on 'The Void' throughout the world, and what intense debates we had. But she is a fey, funny genius with one foot in the spirit world, and I am just me.

Without her permission, I'm going to quote my sister Lesley, one of the wisest people I know.

Me: 'When will we be ready to die?'
Lesley: 'When we die.'

Game, set and match to common sense.

And now the cabbage tree is flowering in sunshine. The cat is searching for mice in a pile of stationery. With friends I'm going to Pina in 3D this afternoon. My family, health, business and life are all thriving.

Mortality? What's that?

Life? Bring it on!

How the show went: Crows Feet Dance Collective in Angle Poise.

2011-08-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

We came, we danced, we conquered some hearts if not every single technical challenge. Visit our new Facebook page for a growing gallery of photos of the old ladies dancing:
http://www.facebook.com/crowsdance

And please Like us! Like everyone, we like to be liked. And it spreads the message -- dancing is great at all ages.

Old ladies dancing: what's difficult about that?

2011-07-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

As the oldest dancer in the Crows Feet Dance Collective, I need all the help I can get. And I get plenty of help from kind friends and my trusty DIY tools: a notebook and Flipp video camera.

Now Angle Poise, our new dance show, is only two weeks away, which is pretty scary. So what do I find most difficult?

Very fast or very slow steps. Too fast, and I lose the plot. Too slow, and I lose my balance.
Orientation: when we learn a dance facing north, and then must do it facing west, I'm bewildered. What side of the stage? Where am I? This may be just a variation of the famous female incapacity for putting flat packs together, but then again, I'm good at map reading.
Too much spinning. I love a bit of spinning, but too much and I get dizzy. (Don't you?)

When I was a teacher, I loved a little girl called Pam. Every Monday for months she asked me why some words in French were masculine and others feminine, with no regard for gender. I knew that Pam was the brave one who dared to state what others also thought.

So when I'm writing notes (8 back RL, 4 x 1/4 turn, 4 x promenade RL ...) or videoing a sequence, I tell myself I'm not a dummy. I'm not too old: I'm just the Crows Feet Pam. Because sometimes others say they also find these things difficult. (Could've fooled me.)

One thing I'll never know, because I have never met my control-self in a parallel universe. Am I slower than the others because I'm older, or because I only began contemporary dance 5 years ago? Or both?

But this I do know: everything about dance that is difficult is also exhilarating. Where's the fun in doing something easy?

Case history of a prosopagnostic

2011-07-02T22:29:00.000-07:00

One happy day I discovered I had prosopagnosia, a glitch in my brain. I'd been bluffing my entire life despite having trouble recognising faces. It's easy: you say 'Hi Rachel,' and I say 'Oh, hi!'

Nevertheless it was a relief. Oh, so I'm not imagining it. Oh, so there's a reason, there's even a label. Maybe it's not a moral flaw to forget people's faces. Maybe I should just give up the struggle.

Think you might have this abnormality of the brain? Here's my experience of prosopagnosia. (What a cool word! I love it!)

Aged 12, first year of high school. A literary little girl, I was fascinated by novels. How did writers write? An inspiring English teacher instructed us to look at plot, style, theme and ... character. Time and time again I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering how a writer could possibly describe my face. Ordinary eyes, forehead, nose, mouth—what could they possibly say? Rachel has a face? As a budding writer, I was mystified. A face is a face is a potato.

Going to the movies. In the early days I recognised Doris Day by her hair and voice, and of course by the name on the poster. I easily recognised Brigitte Bardot from her uniquely big luscious lips (pre-Botox), roughly the same shape as her breasts, and Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn by their hairstyles. So I wasn't doing too badly at first. But soon the pool became too crowded, and now every actor has fifty look-alikes. So today, though I adore the movies, never ask me who the stars are. They all look the same—except for Meryl Streep.

Who is that young man? Surely not —? A nice young man crossed the road, stood 6 inches in front of me, looked me in the eye and said very deliberately, 'Hello, Mum.' Yep, that was my son. He'd had a hair cut.

Who is that strange looking man in my house? A friend of my husband? No, Rachel, that is your husband. He shaved off his beard.

Who is that person in the mirror? It's me, of course. Everyone knows that. Out of context (the mirror) I think I might recognise my forehead and smile. Might not.

To my delight, I find my reflection a more familiar sight since I lost some weight. The jaw now meets the neck in a shape I seem to remember from an earlier era.

Oops, what about that scar on your nose? Minor surgery for skin cancer last week freaked me out, which made no sense for a minor operation. It's funny to think I care so much about spoiling my face, when after all, I see it as a potato. An attractive potato, even a gourmet Jersey Benne potato—but still, a potato.

With age, there's a marvellous bonus for prosopagnostics: I'm no worse at this gig than I was at the age of 12, but my friends say they're getting worse. They think it's is a normal sign of aging.

Prosopagnosia is a funny little ailment that has done me no harm. It's kept me on my toes. And it seems self-indulgent to even mention it, except that all this new brain research is fascinating.

Image: TestMyBrain.org Harvard University: my famous face recognition test result

A yummy life

2011-06-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

My lovely big sister has almost finished the final draft of a terrific memoir. She noticed that many of her stories had a focus on food, and so included a tried-and-true recipe with each story. It's wonderful to read these stories that bring our family meals and eating habits so vividly to life. As for Jill's adult life as a cook and hostess, it was shaped by her creativity and common sense as a young wife, producing menus with colour, taste and charm for sixpence.

This got me thinking about influences on my own cooking and eating over the years. At our age, we're walking, talking gastronomic encyclopaedias. Let me count the ways my own life has shaped the way I eat...

1. My mother: healthy, tasty, simple, cheap and fast! Celia did everything with flair and shortcuts, including cooking. With a big family and a full-time job, she raced into the kitchen and single-handedly prepared our meals at high speed. Daughters did the washing up. The cheapest cuts of meat, fresh veges and fruit from the garden, milk, cream and butter from the cow, eggs from the hens. All organic before there was need for such a word. Porridge, soup, meat and three veg, and pudding to fill up the corners.

2. So-called Continental Cooking classes in 1959-1960. Heavy rich dishes like vol au vent and Hungarian goulash. Add cream and sherry or wine to everything. Put apricots and prunes into casseroles. Exciting, satisfying Friday night food for blokes after the pub.

3. Reefton boiling, roasting and baking. The cooking of my mother-in-law, Vi, was perhaps the most exotic I ever encountered. Boiled mutton with white sauce. Cabbage boiled to mush. Mutton roasted in 3 or 4 cups of lard. Little cakes with strange names and many processes, like Louise cakes and Eccles cakes and Boston buns. I was astonished but did not emulate.

4. Switzerland, from 1961-64. This was a gastronomic awakening for both Grant and me, and we have never recovered, thank goodness! Foods like asparagus, oysters and radishes honoured individually, a course in themselves. A salad with every meal. New foods every day. Fondue, raclette, sauerkraut. Wine with meals. Discovering small quirky cafés with one special dish and a fierce chef. Food was an obsession, and yet it was simpler than the jumble of items we had been throwing on our plates all our lives. For raclette, you only need cheese, gherkin and potato—but it has to be the right cheese, the right gherkin and the right potato.

5. Feeding my own family. As a housewife and mother of four in Masterton, I applied everything I knew to feeding my family. No problem, plenty of fun. When children disliked a food, I cruelly forced them to eat one mouthful—one pea—one bite of asparagus: usually there came a day when their eyes filled with wonder, because suddenly, they got it! Oysters were yummy!

6. 1970s dinner parties: competitive cooking. Bored housewives all, we tried to outdo one other with culinary masterpieces. I produced bombe Alaska, fillet of beef Duke of Wellington, crepes suzettes, boeuf bourgignon—you name it. Ridiculous. But what else is a girl to do in Masterton?

7. Hippy brown stuff. Whole food Vegetarian cafés began popping up in the 70s. Note the capital V, granted because much of this early Vegetarian food was primarily ideological. It pretended to be meat: lentil burgers, vege sausages, tofu steaks, brewers yeast and lecithin on everything. Some delicious, some disgusting, all of it righteous, too much of it brown. In Taranaki and Golden Bay, I lived among the hippies. Vegetables remain my top-favourite, number-one primary food group. I love them as they are and I don't like to see them tortured.

8. The Japan aesthetic. For two years I lived as a privileged professor in Kyoto, the heart of elegant Japanese cuisine. For a time, I lived with a tea professor and a kaiseki chef. My aesthetic sense was polished to the point of baldness. I make sashimi and I love the Zen side of food appreciation, but I'm fussy about which Japanese place I eat at.

9. Cafés and Moore Wilson. Living in Mt Victoria means passing cafés every time I walk to town. Small, beautiful, fresh, creative snacks and meals. Fusion without fuss. Lunch in a paper bag from De Luxe. Brat in a bun at l'Affaré. Breakfast with friends at Mojo. Business meetings at Jimmy's. Well, you get the drift. Then when grandchildren come to stay it's yum cha or sushi or both.

10. Travels in Asia. Life takes me here and there. China, Tokelau, Tonga, Samoa, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and India, for example. Each time it's a reminder that the ethnic meals produced in New Zealand are a pale reflection of their original selves, brushed bland for our foreign palate. The world is full of amazing flavours.

11. Live-aloner stair-thinker cooking. Living with a family or even just one other person, I found it easy to produce meals for 2 or 4 or 10. But I've lived alone for more than 20 years now, and my habits are very different.

Nowadays, cooking for one person is what's easy and soothing and fun. Virtually every day I cook something wonderful for both lunch and dinner. Yesterday's lunch was a salad of silver beet (lightly steamed), baked beetroot, persimmon, walnut and feta cheese. Other days last week I ate Thai red curry fish soup, pork and pea soup from my freezer, salmon omelette with a green salad, toasted sandwich—whatever, I love it all.

Normally I run downstairs from my office, and on the stairs I think about what I'll cook. Today, for once, I'm thinking ahead: rösti with a salad of broccoli and pear, maybe. It depends what's in the fridge. And there's always enough for one person.

But you can't prepare a menu for guests while running down the stairs. You have to think ahead. Make decisions. Even go shopping. The cooking is still easy, but thinking about what to cook can be strangely disconcerting. I am better at making lightning decisions than methodical ones. What's more, I invent many dishes on the spot and never make them again. Recipes do not feature. So I'm illogically nervous that the dish of the day might be just too eccentric for anyone but me.

The sum total? I'm happy with my food. Almost every meal I say out loud, 'Yummy! Mmm! That was delicious!' What I eat is constructed from a brilliant foundation in childhood, the constraints of raising a family on a budget, the wonderful foods available to us here in this privileged enclave of New Zealand, and the stimulation of many outside influences.

And every step of my culinary development has been tightly associated with particular people. That's the beauty of it.

Lucky lucky me. I have a yummy life.

That's my food story. What's yours?

The Hulme-Parker murder revisited

2011-05-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

Today I watched Reflections of the Past, a documentary about the notorious Hulme-Parker murder case in Christchurch in 1954. As a documentary, it left much to be desired, but it stirred up new thoughts about the personal agenda of the many interviewees—and of myself. Many of us have a stake in how the murder is perceived by others—which is tightly entangled in how we perceive ourselves.

I was a classmate of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker.

The school photo was taken after they had both left school; I don't know the date, but I suspect it's 1954, when they were in prison.

The shock and scandal left its mark on the school, the country—and me. Small things, and temporary, but big for me. My fantasy life went from vivid to obsessively, terrifyingly weird and violent. I shoved the blame for my own confusion on to my blameless mother and was mean to her for several years.

Strangest of all, I felt guilty for abandoning Juliet, especially after learning how her parents had repeatedly abandoned her or sent her away when she was ill. I made a few attempts to write to her in prison and gave up when she didn't answer. Many years later, Alison Laurie and Julie Glamuzina told me my letters would certainly not have been delivered, and I sobbed with the release of guilt and grief.

I was not a friend of Juliet's. My mother and Mrs Hulme had brought us together before Juliet enrolled at Christchurch Girls' High School, hoping we might become friends. The idea was that we were both geniuses, with IQs of [insert arbitrary number]—a ludicrous belief of the 1950s—both loved reading and writing and were highly imaginative. And so it appeared we would have a lot in common.

We didn't click. She was two years older than me; I'd been promoted and she'd been ill. In her company I felt like a rebellious child. While others were in awe of her, I just wanted to keep my distance.

The documentary interviewed far too many people.

Some (for example Peter Graham and Michelanne Forster) had interesting, true and new things to say.

Some had zero credibility, the worst example being a young male 'teacher' who hypothesized about girls getting the cane for not getting their homework right, in the 1950s. (In case you wondered, that's rubbish.) Alexander Roman, the film maker, said he had trouble finding people to interview; rather, he had trouble leaving people out.

On the upside, most of these witnesses and pretenders revealed their attitude to Juliet and Pauline. Many had something to prove, and that's not a bad thing. It's just human.

So I asked myself why I was in the cinema. What do I have to prove?

I do have a stake in the story, and it is a story, a true story, but not a mystery. (We know who held Honora Parker down by her neck and bashed her to death with a brick, and we know why.)

I suppose I want to be assured that I am myself, a person in my own right, and still worthwhile even though I couldn't see or understand what was going on under my nose at the time, and even though I abandoned a girl I didn't like and who no doubt despised me.

Big things happen, bad things happen. And people on the periphery are affected in all sorts of ways. Denial. Fear. Anger. Sympathy. Empathy. Arousal. Bewilderment. Guilt by association. Guilt for surviving. Guilt for doing nothing to stop it.

Here's a reason to go to the documentary: the old buildings of Christchurch before the earthquake feature prominently in all their glory. Christchurch Girls High School was recently demolished after serious damage.

Two sides of the Parker-Hulme murder
Reflections of the past: Alexander Roman documentary
Reflections of the Past: web site of the documentary

Adjusting to widowhood

2011-05-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Anne Else blogs about the huge adjustment necessary after the death of her husband of 30 years, poet Harvey McQueen. In so doing, she gives a voice (or a point of difference, which is just as valuable) to others who have been bereft in this way. This is brave of her, and useful, and inevitable, because she is a lifelong writer.

Mainly I just want to draw attention to her blog. If it reaches and helps other widows and widowers, that's good. It is difficult for others to understand what you're going through. I just watch in awe as Anne and other friends and relatives painstakingly reconstruct their lives after the walls have been removed. I see that this takes ingenuity, imagination, effort and thought. It doesn't happen naturally.

Anne's blog: Elsewoman — Learning to live on my own for the first time in my life

Our glorious grown-up brains

2011-04-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

In an airport recently I picked up Barbara Strauch's best-seller, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain. Now, technically, I'm a little more than grown-up: technically I should be over the hill — yet mysteriously, like you, I am not.

Research old and new explains why on the one hand, I can't for the life of me remember whether I've read that book by whatsisname, and on the other hand, I believe that mentally I'm in peak form. Turns out these are both facts, and they're not incompatible, not at all.

Mature people are inclined to tell the identical story twice... or many times ... to lapse into a conversational loop. And I've already told this story once. So please go direct to my business blog:
Your Miss Marple Brain at work and play.

I talk about this on a video. So you get to not exactly chat with me, but be chatted to. Bye now.

The metallic rush of turning 71

2011-04-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

Life goes on: the cliche sprang to my mind when I realized I had ignored this blog for 2 months, and the last time I posted I was a mere 70 years old. OK, Old Lady Laughing will always be a personal indulgence, a mere toy, as long as I'm heavily involved in my business, Contented.com. Even so, let me do a quick update.

The trigger for Old Lady Laughing was the awe-inspiring achievement — and the what-next existential challenges — of having lived 7 decades. Now I've survived that interesting year and I'm used to being in my 70s. For the moment, living as a slightly older lady is fairly straightforward: business as usual!

Numbers have their own magic. I reckon 71 carries a lot more clout than 70.

I say, 'I'm 70.' You think, 'OK, round figure, good on you.'

I say, 'I'm 71.' You think, 'Oh. You're committed, then! You're on the way to 80.'

Image: Unisex 'anti-perfume' by Comme des Garcons. Obviously this is the scent we 71-year-olds should all be wearing. Basenotes.net says:

When you first smell the fragrance you get a big metallic rush, it's very different. ... Electricity, Metal, Office, Mineral, Dust on a hot light bulb, photocopier toner, Hot metal, Toaster, fountain pen ink, Pencil Shavings, The salty taste of a battery, incense, Wood, Moss, Willow, Elm, Birch, Bamboo, Hyacinth and Lettuce Juice.

So ... does this reflect me, in theory? Pretty much!

Today's diary: Meditate; Blog in office at computer; work in office at computer; make toast; change batteries in phone; get new washing machine installed; dance rehearsal on wooden floor; do sudoku with pencil; eat lettuce salad; throw away pot of dead hyacinths; blat out.

That metallic rush surely trumps the smell of old-lady-lavender. But is it ... actually ... nice? I'll probably stick to Dune.

Like the hair you've got. That's what you've got.

2011-02-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

Yes, those are pea shoots growing in a container on my kitchen bench. Tasty (if a bit hairy) in salads, perfect in stir-fry.

They have a growth pattern disturbingly similar to my hair in February, 2011. (Remember, I'm a poet.)

I read recently a comment from a wise woman, whose name I don't recall—sorry about that. It goes something like this:

'We should all get to love and accept our hair early in life, because that's the hair we've got.'

If I'd read that when I was 14, I would have scoffed. Get used to my hair? No way. I wanted hair like the models in Seventeen magazine. Any model, any hair but mine.

At the time, my hair was thick and lustrous and blonde. Cut in a pudding bowl style that made me look like the pudding, but capable of growing very soon into a bouncy pony-tail that was perfect for rock and roll.

Magazines deceived us with tips on making our hair curlier, straighter, thicker, thinner, less dry, less oily, more like a fantasy woman's totally incompatible tresses and less like our own perfectly wonderful hair. They still do that, of course. And we still expect hairstylists to perform miracles.

Twice in my teens I subjected my hair to Toni Home Perms, and twice it emerged even straighter than before. (Good thing.) The Greek sun bleached it to platinum blonde, the Geneva winters created a brunette, and all by myself I turned a glorious henna red for a couple of years. As for styling, I've had everything from a French roll to a Number Two buzz cut with a poodle clipper.

The upside of this congenital discontent is that hair is very forgiving. Pretty much whatever you do, it grows right back, just the way it used to be.

Over the years, however, hair does inexorably change. It's unmissable evidence that we are, yes we are growing older. Some follicles give up the ghost and you can see the skull through the faithful few that cling loyally on like seaweed. New hairs slither out of your skull that are greyer or whiter and coarser because they are technically dead. (The scalp as a forest of dead, lichen-draped trees or a cemetery with zombies: charming.)

But nature still has a few surprises. In August of my 70th year, something bizarre happened. The undergrowth went crazy and new hair began to grow like weeds. The first ones are up to the canopy already. Fuzzy furly new hairs keep forcing their way into the forest and I just look different.
I asked my hairdresser why my hair has abruptly, blatantly started to grow again. Is it Moroccan Oil or is it the secret of eternal youth?

'It's just a cycle,' she said. 'Some people have a 5-7 year biological cycle, and you must be on the up and up.'

Second time around, I won't complain. I'll like the hair I've got.

Writing for fun again: what am I to do? Can't help it!

2011-02-01T13:27:00.000-08:00

So, my 70th year is almost over—doh! (That happens, Rachel.) It's been awesome and the next year will be awesome too.

An influx of maturity and wisdom never arrived, sorry to report.

But just in the nick of time I can imagine my next writing project. Thank goodness: there's nothing more fun than writing for fun.

Ever since finishing Scarlet Heels: 26 stories about sex, I've been almost 100% businesswoman—apart from a blissful stint as writer in residence at Lavigny. I've even stopped transcribing poems that dribbled out of my granddaughter's mouth because I felt I was invading her privacy.

Lately I have been inspired by Maud Casey, a wonderful young New York novelist who was with me at Lavigny. I've just read The Shape of Things To Come. She has that proportion thing right: the prose is exceedingly easy to read and understand and yet quite often there's a sentence that's so brazenly original and wise or mysterious or metaphorical, it's like a salutary slap in the face. I don't want to be boring or bored, but I don't want to be impenetrable or pretentious either. Maud is my model at present.

That, and reading a patchy book of memoirs by distinguished old NZers, yesterday gave me a vision of my next writing project. Very thrilling to see the way it could be, even if it never happens. I think I'm going to write random poems randomly related to life as an officially older person. Not unlike this blog, but as poems.

Odd and funny and real would be the goal. And not boring! I'm sick of oldies who relate earnestly how life was when they were young, how it's changed and what they think of that. I don't care.

I don't usually announce what I'm going to write: that's just asking for trouble. But I'm old enough to be pretty sure this one will happen. Not quickly, because I'm busy. But in a steady dribble, as is appropriate for an old lady laughing.

Writing for fun again—what am I to do? I can't help it.

What I love and hate about Christianity

2011-01-14T20:29:00.000-08:00

I'm reading The Naked Buddha: a demythologised account of the man and his teaching by Eric Harrison. The author has been a committed Buddhist for 25 years and a meditation teacher for more than 40 years.

He explains why Buddhism grows very very slowly, and why Westerners turn away. He's refreshingly honest:

...my approach is to highlight the good as I see it (which can be very, very good) and point out the bad (which can be quite awful).

This honesty—so rare it's almost unthinkable—stimulated me to think about what I love and hate about Christianity. And why I walked out of church in the 70s and virtually never went back. I'm not highlighting the good and the bad objectively: this is strictly personal.

What I love about Christianity

My Dad, a vicar and a battler
God is love (the message we got from our Dad)
Worship, being consciously grateful
Values of kindness, service to others, and generosity
Peaceful meditation and food for thought
Inspiring ministers: good, brave, wise people
Jesus: a human being
"Life is real, now: make your own heaven"
Aesthetics: music, stained glass, flowers
Poetry: the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer
Mary
Ritual and chanting
Myth and metaphor
Adventurous theology
The City Mission.

What I loathe about Christianity or at least some factions

Some of what repels me, like the first item, is not intrinsically bad: it simply doesn't suit me at all. Some is all in my own mind. And some is genuinely bad, bad, bad.

I know people who help to create wonderful church communities and they belong there and improve the world. But I walked out one Sunday when it struck me that only 5 of the 400-odd people in the church would have the slightest understanding of my own position. (The 5 included the minister, bless him!) In every service I had been mentally translating the words into a more compatible theology.

Then I caught feminism and the translation job became impossible. Frankly, I didn't belong in a church.

Gradually feminism began to soften church misogyny. But it was far too late for me. I can't stand:

Being part of an artificially constructed community
Boring, false, or foolish ministers
Persistent masculinity and paternalism
Too much guilt
Arrogance
Persistent anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-other attitudes
Exclusivity: this is the right way and the only way
Wealth and control and greed
A sense of pointlessness.

Well, let it go. Growing older, I can see the big picture. I think...

Photo: The Jesus Place at Gobind Sadan, Delhi

My first new year resolution in 70 years

2011-01-09T11:16:00.000-08:00

A New Year's resolution? I don't remember ever making one before. At least, not one that lasted more than ten minutes, not one that felt fun and difficult and right. Here it is:

I will buy no clothes in 2011.

Last year was the year of the clothes. Almost my entire wardrobe got refurbished. I had plenty of excuses, or justifications. I lost 7 or 8 kilos (that's a lot on Short People like me) and only my favourite clothes were worth altering. Then there were new clothes for weddings and conferences and India. And some garments were bought because I got a sudden urge to look like a grown-up—at least sometimes.

I normally give away or throw away something equivalent when I purchase something, so I probably don't have a larger number of clothes than before—but they are all fun or useful and I like them.

In other words I am spoiled rotten and have far too much Stuff.

Denying yourself a purchase can be a very satisfying experience. I get an unholy kick out of shopping but I also love psyching myself up to buy something... then changing my mind. Recently I did that on a large scale, saving myself at least 10,000 fantasy dollars. I decided to turn a little archive room into a bathroom, planned it, chose fittings. Then I changed my mind. Do I really need a second bathroom? Of course not.

Now, about the money I'll be saving. Who shall I give it to? My top favourite good cause is Books in Homes. I sponsor a couple of schools and could maybe add another one. We'll see how we go.

Books in homes

Old lady in Delhi

2010-12-04T11:59:00.000-08:00

This old lady went to Delhi for 11 days in November. I attended the 12th Annual Conference of the Society for Technical Communication India Chapter, went to Pune for one day on business, and to Agra as a tourist.

Oh dear. I feel a niggling urge to defend myself against my own inner critic.

Rachel critic: You didn't have a Delhi experience. You had a conference-in-the-Sheraton experience.
Rachel defendant: It was excellent, and an ideal plan for a business trip, my first in India.

Rachel critic: You spent a lot of money for the privilege, didn't you?
Rachel defendant: Oh get over it. Staying in the Sheraton sure made my professional activities run smoothly, and that's what I was there for.

Rachel critic: You only saw five beggars the whole time you were there! Don't tell me you saw the Real Delhi.
Rachel defendant: So at least part of Delhi had been upgraded and sterilized for the Commonwealth Games and the Obamas' visit. Is that my fault? Anyway I didn't go there to see Delhi. I went to introduce our wonderful Contented online courses to India and to explore the potential of this fascinating new market.

Rachel critic: OK I give up. Tell it your way.
My way: I enjoyed the conference, the people, the presentations. It was very well run and I learned heaps about the technical communication industry in India. Doors opened a chink. Contented.com has already benefited.

I also learned a personal lesson: one inspiring presentation is worth 21 educational or marketing presentations. Wow! That was such a surprise. Because I had to give two presentations, I quite frivolously called one Knowledge, Wisdom, and the Joy of Writing. It was such fun to express my feelings on this topic, and I spoke with joy and saw joy reflected in delegates' faces.

What a lesson for me: be less earnest, join the dance, let yourself go, and enjoy the consequences.

The annual holiday letter: prickles and problems

2010-12-04T11:33:00.000-08:00

2010 is far from over—27 precious days remain—but I've already received one Happy holidays! letter. Email makes it so easy to review the year for friends.

Or is it for ourselves? I feel ambivalent about these annual letters. I enjoy receiving them but have usually refrained from sending them. Why? Well, my writerly professionalism kicks in with editorial challenges. I find it's very hard to get the tone "right". I don't even know what tone I should attempt to strike.

Purpose paralysis: Seems simple enough at first sight: to review the year as lived by me. Or is it the year as lived by my family?

Audience ambiguities: This is a chance to maintain contact with friends and family that I don't keep in touch with during the year. So, first problem, would I send also this letter to close friends and family, who know perfectly well what I've been doing all year?

And those not-so-close friends: what would interest them, honestly?

The holiday letter audience is an unusual audience, non-specific yet personally known to me: a bunch of friends, family and acquaintances. They're special to me in their individual ways.

No wonder the holiday letter is difficult to write. It's not a personal letter. It's not an open letter. It's not an article. It's not a blog post like this, which is primarily for me, but which anyone can read. Maybe it's more like giving a speech at your own party.

Content quandaries: what to say, how much to say, how little to say? Are big adventures more interesting than little everyday realities? To whom? Should social events figure more than my professional interests? Does what interests me interest my correspondees?

Tone torture: How to prevent my letter from seeming like one big boast. You know what I mean.

I am so happy that my children, grandchildren and sisters are all living their own lovely, healthy lives. All grandparents ooze with excitement about the triumphs of their grandchildren. But if I write about that to a non-specific but known audience, how does that affect a friend whose beloved grandson died this year, or all those friends with tiny disfunctional families?

I'm tickled pink by my own adventures in developing the business of Contented.com and this has dominated my year. But to most of my friends and family, that's either a big yawn or yet another irritating boast.

This year, 2010, has indeed been truly wonderful for me. My main discovery is that for me personally, 70 is a marvellous age. Everything is ticking over nicely right now and I expect that to continue for another 10 years at least. And all the fun has an extra veneer of glee, just because I'm 70.

Maybe this is a cop-out, maybe a wise editorial decision: I'm thinking I shall just email everyone (well, not everyone) a link to this blog. The entries are pretty random but they mention at least some of the highlights of the year, and are more like a conversation than an executive summary. They don't mention my family much if at all. Yes. That's what I'll do.

To all my friends and acquaintances, and anyone else who happens to read this blog:
Happy holidays!

Diary of a senior Paris tourist

2010-08-29T04:58:00.000-07:00

I've just spent a week in Paris, alone.

It's always felt kind of weird, being a tourist. I'm not against tourism, but prefer having some sort of mission or role or work when travelling.

Being a tourist makes you almost automatically a skimmer and scanner and dilettante. In general, I have never liked that state of mind. Hard to believe, but I prefer focusing, going deep rather than wide.

My only mission, such as it was, was to examine the workings of my own brain in this unusual-for-me situation.

So this time around, aged 70, how bad was my tourist-brain? If bad, how much was ditzimush brain due to age, tourism, internet habits and other factors respectively?

Answer: Despite being a tourist and despite 15 years as an internet junkie, I'm satisfied with the way my brain has behaved. It's been in calm control most of the time.

Are you familiar with that mildly frantic feeling when you confuse something — was that Monet or Manet — north or south — left or right — L'Orangerie or Orsay?*##! This week, I haven't experienced any of that mild but awkward tourist panic.

Firstly, I reckon I'm reaping the rewards of meditating twice a day. This I began last January to counteract high blood pressure. At the time, a friend explained that meditating twice a day has an effect much more profound than meditating once a day. And it's true, I find my state of mind is exponentially different, as if I can hold on to the benchmark of a still, clear mind for 24 hours. So I'm calmer, hard to fluster than I was even last year.

Secondly, I believe my age has been an advantage. I am who I am. Will I ever improve (as in become a more efficient tourist)? Unlikely! And every now and then I think about being dead. Sure puts things in perspective.

Physically, being older meant one day one of my hips protested. Then it stopped. I walked everywhere. Heaps. I've got incipient cataracts which probably mean I don't see Paris quite as brilliantly as other people do — but how would I know? It still looks great to me. Perhaps with better hearing my understanding of French would improve, but I'm more than satisfied with my progress.

Overall, I've enjoyed being a senior tourist just as much as being a junior tourist. Maybe more.

Boring diary follows
Do not read the following. It's boring. But if I don't write this down, will I remember? Regardless, does it matter if I don't remember?

Monday. Arrived Gare de Lyon on the fast train from Geneva. Did not lug my serious suitcase up stairs to Le train bleu restaurant. Ate downstairs and got oriented. Bought redundant carnet of metro tickets. Took taxi to the Villa Mazarin: 5.6 euro, tres simple. Walked the quays. Icecream, spicy hot chocolate.

Tuesday.
Museums shut: wandered around churches. Notre Dame, S. Germain des Pres, S. Severin, S. Etienne du Mont... Many dark pictures of people in agony rolling their eyes. Devout woman prostrate on the floor. Brain teeming, need not share. Ate at Les Deux Magots, did not eat snails but watched rich people. Bought silly gifts for family. Wandered happily through Jardins du Palais Luxembourg. Stumbled across free concert of Spanish choral music by Spanish (Madruda?) university choir in S. Nicholas church: such a treat.

Wednesday. Serious day at the Louvre. Slept in but still got there by 10. Skipped queue by entering through the Lion gate. Guiltily acknowledge my naive preference for portraits and simplicity and mediaeval paintings. Enjoyed the other tourists. Strolled through Tuileries gardens. Think I'm starting to understand the Paris garden philosophy. L'Orangerie for the big Monet garden paintings. Great lunch place, a tea and coffee specialist, #24 in The Book (Pauline Frommer's Paris.) Dinner l'As au Falafel, great, cheap falafels. Sore hip! Did clam exercise assiduously and took a pill.

Thursday. Decided to forgo camera for the day. Went to Carcaret Museum: shut for the day, 'technical reason'. Picasso Museum: shut for August. Much strolling. For lunch, I ordered 3 os a moelle - three marrow bones. Literally: no meat, no veg, just 3 bones. Never had marrow as a meal before. Soooo rich and fatty! No veges. One bone had no marrow and patron replaced it with very good will. Went to Centre Pompidou. Full of young people, yay!! Exhibition of femmes @ pompidou, plenty to inspire and remind me of the wild women of the 70s and 80s. (I was one too.) Bought buttons "La Corbusier" and "Annie Warhol". Totally enjoyed the modern art (up to 1960: they rotate the exhibitions) but in my mind cannot separate the works from those in the Musee d'Orsay. Dinner at tiny eccentric mom-and-pop Felteu not far away. Patron is boss, one must obey! Chatted with French couple. Am getting fat I think. Oh well, sort it later.

Friday. Hip feels fine again now: Louvre day was just too much for the senior bones. Camera-free day. Walked to Musee d'Orsay, Orsum. Lunch, La Palette, arty area, just fine. Then what did I do? I have no idea. Oh yes I do: the Cluny museum (national museum of middle ages). Easy to see why it's everyone's favourite. There I found the perfect souvenirs, but I wasn't allowed to take one away. What I really wanted was almost any small mediaeval statue of Mary.

Later I bought a compromise Paris souvenir: a ridiculous pair of shoes. Dinner, La Tartine, salad. Evening, went looking for Paris Danse en Seine. Couldn't find these freewheeling groups of dancers. Probably didn't walk far enough. Or they stop in August. Or a little rain cancelled. Did see a crazy poet-performer singing his heart out on one of the bridges, and a student band on the banks of the Seine. Plenty going on.

Saturday. Camera free day. Morning, did some work in hotel. Finally checked out the theatres, too late for cheap tickets though. Tons going on: if I'd got my act together I could have gone to a play every night. Tant pis. Walked to Grand Mosque, further than I expected. 1920s, tiles, arches, brass tables in the restaurant. Ate lamb tagine with olives and pickled lemons: must do this with lamb necks! Sweet mint tea.

Then hammam: lounging around in the fabulous old steam baths, a labyrinth of room after room, women being massaged on marble tables, taps and buckets same as Japanese baths, shared a marble cubicle with a pyramid-shaped old lady who was doing a very thorough job on every part of her amazing anatomy. Woman exfoliated her at one stage. Then ate a sweet almond and coconut cookie in the special waiting room, and viewed the mosque itself. It's lovely, not too severe. Walked to Rue des Ecoles area, took another look at St Etienne, a joyous, sunny, extravagant church near the Pantheon, had coffee. 5.30, 26-yr-old star musician Timothee who? played Bach cello suites 1, 3 and 4 in the tiny, quaint Syrian church S. Ephre (?) on Rue des Carmes. Great!

Hurried to Cafe de la Gare in Rue du Temple, very near my hotel. Signs said clearly house full, no tickets for that night's performance of Un Tour de Monde en 80 Jours. But the boss gave me one anyway: being alone can be an advantage. Back to hotel, dumped bags, put on glad rags just for fun including new shoes, and joined the queue for the play. It was great fun and I understood enough to laugh plenty.

Sunday. Gregorian mass at Notre Dame. Amazingly undisturbed by tourists, very smooth and swift. Four young women's voices filled this enormous space (with mikes I presume but didn't see any) and we joined in, following the Gregorian musical annotation: kind of pixillated, sequence sometimes vertical. Horrible silly expensive lunch at the wrong place. Strolled around some more, the last time. Ever? Gave my metro tickets to a young deaf-mute girl working a petition outside Pompidou Centre.

Now it's 4 pm and I'm writing this diary in the hotel courtyard. It was already hard to recall what I did this week, so good job Rachel. Gotta go. Planes to catch, home is calling. Goodbye Paris and thanks for all the fish.

Walkers in the night

2010-08-17T04:42:00.000-07:00

Oldladylaughing is not a tourist blog. But exotic Lavigny is where I happen to be, and there's a lot of laughing.

The countryside here (just inland from Morges, near Lausanne) is laced with excellent paths that meander from village to village through vineyards, sunflowers, orchards, woods and meadows. It's hugely friendly for walkers and cyclists.

Last night three of us pushed it some by walking all the way to the lake. It only took an hour each way, but I felt quite bold because it was dark and a tad rainy, and we had no idea what route to take, no map no money no torch. But how hard could it be, we figured, if you just wander downhill towards the lake?

It's true. We really did it. Don't believe me? Check the indisputable archival evidence. Top photo: actual water in actual Lac Leman. Photo below: the three intrepid midnight walkers. Not?

Young food, new food

2010-08-17T04:22:00.000-07:00

Several wonderful cooks compete for first place in our bellies here at Lavigny. Every meal so far has been delicious -- including raclette one night -- but on Sunday I was moved to photograph a couple of these masterpieces.

Missed the entree: it got scoffed before I could focus. Sliced smoked salmon with toast, butter, lemon, pepper and capers. Mmmm.

Every mouthful of quiche was a Eureka! for me. Short version: sliced goats' cheese (melting, creamy), courgettes (crunchy) and tomatoes (juicy, sharp, yummy) with herbs.

Then what? Chestnut vermicelli with cream and icecream. Champion gourmande on this occasion, I was the only one who could finish this rich and royal dessert.

I've been in training for this all my life.

Aubonne streets: where front is back

2010-08-17T03:59:00.000-07:00

We walked over to Aubonne the other day. This part of Switzerland seems virtually unchanged since 1964. A sweeping statement, I know, but compared with almost any other place I'm familiar with, the villages around here seem set in aspic. Chunky streets with historic authenticity present a rather stolid face to visitors. And so incredibly quiet! But around the back, or in the next street, real life happens after all. Kids chattering. Allotments. People making pots or sunning themselves in the garden.

Some old people are like these old streets. Formally dressed and ultra-conservative at first sight. But if you can just get into the back yard of their mind, you might discover a very human being, pulling out weeds and enjoying the sunshine.

A privilege of age eludes me

2010-08-17T03:35:00.000-07:00

I forgot to state my age in my Chateau de Lavigny application form. I wasn't being coy, but perhaps I just didn't see the question.

Now, if the committee had known of my advanced age, I would be sleeping in a formidable four-poster bed. It's the privilege of the oldest woman writer in each group, it seems.

Instead I was given a delightful room with a more modest sized bed. My room has the same old chintzy fabric on the walls, doors, chairs, and curtains. It's like sleeping in a doll's house. I imagine each night a giant security officer lifts off the ceiling and checks that I'm safely sleeping.

Swaddled as I am, I feel secure and coddled. I'm glad the usual hierarchy broke, because I've got comfort instead of opulence, domesticity instead of grandeur.

Chateau Lavigny: perfect writers' residence

2010-08-08T00:38:00.000-07:00

Read all about the Chateau de Lavigny in the village of Lavigny, near Morges, in Suisse Romande. The Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt is a memorial to the extraordinary German publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rohwohlt, established by his equally extraordinary wife Jane. Since 1996, their home has been a writers' residence each summer.

The reality? I'm in bliss as a guest writer in this idyllic spot right now. 'Idyllic' hints, I hope, at the fact that this is almost too good (pretty, congenial, tranquil) to be true. I certainly haven't been saintly enough in this life to deserve it. Must have had a previous life as a goddess.

Classic writers-around-the-table photo, 7 pm get-together. Meet Paul La Farge, Uche Umezurike, Maud Casey, Sunny Singh, and Tatania, Sophie Kandaouroff and Martin Eriksen. Sophie, actor and film director, is also our on-the-spot manager and hostess. (I'm there too, honestly.)

View from the garden, across the Lac Leman to France, Mont Blanc, and Geneva.

Speaking of goddesses, the Goddess of Books is secreted in a mirrored cubby-hole along with LP records, romantic blurred and fading pictures of the great Jane Ledig-Rohwohlt, and a state-of-the-art 1960s record player. The external aesthetic serenity of the chateau and the entire village is one thing. Inside, extreme artefacts erupt, reflecting imagination and feverish fertility. Figures, for the man who published Albert Camus, Henry Miller, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Gunther Grass, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Harold Pinter, Jean-Paul Sartre and the rest.

Since the theme of this blog is growing older, I hope you deduce that writers never stop writing. Perhaps we never die.

The quality of the end of life

2010-06-26T14:38:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, a young family member survived her second heart attack. While we hope and believe she will live many years longer, she is arranging an enduring power of attorney, and exploring living wills and advance directives for doctors.

I discussed the latter two options with my son. He says (as a GP), the EPOA is crucial, but frank discussions with close family about various death-bed scenarios are worth far more than any written instructions. When healthy, we cannot predict which of 1,000 situations will be ours at the end of life. He said, just think about which faculties are indispensible, and which ones you could bear to live without.

My own attitudes have changed over time. I've gone from the "Put me down! I don't want to be a burden!" to realising that this request would itself be an unbearable burden for my children. That what seems unbearable to a 20-year-old may be tolerable to a 90-year-old.

Above all, I'd like my children's wishes to play a major part in making end-of-life decisions.

When my mother-in-law was young, she repeatedly said that death would be better than losing her mind. But when she lost her mind, she appeared to be as happy as Larry. Always a sweet-natured woman, she stayed that way.

If by bad luck someone must decide when to "pull the plug" on my life, I hope I will be completely unaware of the fact. If I'm aware, I hope that includes a certainty that my children must do what is right for them. They'll have my blessing.

Talk of "what Mum would have wanted" is ultimately sheer speculation, living will or no living will. I expect to adjust my opinion frequently, at times every day or every hour. I trust my children's empathy and communal common sense. And they don't have to be perfect! Nothing can negate our past happiness and shared experiences.

This morning, these thoughts came back into my mind, because dementia and Alzheimers were the topic of a moving documentary on Radio New Zealand.

A living will

When do I want to die?
When my body tells me to.

If I lose my words,
feed me music and birdsong.

If I lose my balance,
feed me videos of dancing.

If I lose my self,
show me children and the sea.

Feed me life until
I lose my appetite.

When do I want to die?
Let me go

before my crippled life
begins to cripple yours.

I have lived in joy.
Let me leave this life

before I lose
the memory of joy.

To be a poet in Switzerland

2010-05-17T13:53:00.001-07:00

On May Day I got one of those dream emails, offering me a place as a Writer in Residence at the lovely Chateau de Lavigny, in Morges, near Lausanne in Switzerland. Look at it!

I am overjoyed for three reasons.

1. It's an honour and a privilege.

2. It's in Suisse Romande area, where I lived for four years in my youth. I went with my husband to Geneva nearly 50 years ago, where we popped out of our provincial bubble. We worked, played, ate, drank, skied, and sightsaw for all we were worth. We also had our first baby (Geoff) in Geneva. So this is a nostalgia trip for me, revisiting gorgeous places with strong emotional connections.

3. Bliss: 3 weeks in which to focus on writing. 3 weeks to live inside my own head and write, write, write... and think, think, think. 3 weeks without housework.

4. It's only 3 weeks, which suits me perfectly. I've enjoyed living in other countries (Switzerland, Australia and Japan) and I love short exotic holidays. But months in a writers' residence would not suit me at all.

5. Four other writers will be in residence at the same time so there'll be interesting talk with people who will seem both alien (all from different countries) and familiar (all writers).

So that's the news, folks! Good, ay? Now, 2 months to polish up my French.

Le Chateau de Lavigny

10 ways dancing keeps you young

2010-05-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

The birthday of fabulous Jo fell on a Wednesday (Crows' rehearsal day) this year, and Sally baked a delicious cake. We raised our glasses after rehearsal to yet another triumphant year ahead.

Jo and Sally aren't old, but they are dancing in the direction of the much documented "young old".

Let me count the ways that Crows Feet dancing—and probably any regular dancing—keeps you young.

1. It strengthens your bones.
2. Improves your posture and therefore your figure.
3. Raises fitness and muscle tone.
4. Makes extra demands on your brain.
5. Improves your spatial sense and physical memory.
6. Charges you with adrenalin at performance time.
7. Raises expectations: the team depends on you.
8. Gives structure to your week, if you work and live alone.
9. Makes you wear outrageous costumes at least three times a year.
10. Provides a warm, supportive, fun social group.

Coffin put to good use: memento mori

2010-04-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

Why spend money on a coffin that you'll never see, never knowingly use?

The owner of Hyde Central Hotel uses hers as a jolly green display stand.

Brilliant, and totally zen.

Otago Rail Trail bike ride: perfect

2010-04-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

So, our bicycle tour of the Otago Rail Trail was perfectly wonderful. No surprise, as that's what everyone says.
~ Great big scenery all the way.
~ Four days of not-too-hot sunshine, half a day of wind gusts and rain sprinkles to remind us how lucky we'd been.
~ Very happy group of family and friends who enjoy one another's company.
~ Fun places to stay, lots of stops along the way.
~ All planning, bookings, decisions, management and bikes provided by the excellent Brian Farrant of New Zealand Bicycle Tours.
~ Just hard enough to make me feel proud, but so easy that children and many people my age and older were doing it.

nzbicycletours.com

Packing for the Otago Rail Trail bike ride

2010-04-06T03:18:00.001-07:00

So, I've been packing for the great 70th birthday celebration with family and friends: the Otago Rail Trail bicycle tour.

I love packing. I love thinking about it, laying things out, choosing, rejecting, last minute panic because all my merino sweaters are dirty, dithering over shoes and jackets and t-shirts. I love almost forgetting something vital, like the camera, then remembering in the nick of time.

I love writing down the times when I have to get up, call the shuttle, and arrive at the airport. I love leaving things until it's almost too late. I love the last minute dash to a friend's house with a vase of water lilies that I can't bear to throw out.

How boring it would be to have employees to do all those chores. Preparing for travel is half the pleasure.

Now it's time to set the alarm and leap into bed.

Headlines I like

2010-03-31T12:55:00.000-07:00

1. Man, 70, in tree fall
I'm sorry he fell. But so glad he was up a tree. He's in Nelson, hotbed of maverick getting-old people.

2. Still chasing balloons at 82
This wonderful woman is part of a family hot-air crew, hauling heavy bags and ropes, and loving it all.

3. At 102, he'll still be up early to recall his mates.

Blogging is good for the health (I think)

2010-03-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

Yet another convert! My friend Anon is going into hospital for an operation, and will be out of action for quite some time. This was a shock cancer diagnosis, though her prospects are excellent.

Already changes are rippling through her psyche, and (being a writer) she wants to document events over the next year.

She's never had a blog, despite being a 50-year-old writer.

Anon wanted to know, what's different about a blog? Why not just write on the computer?

So I demonstrated with this entry just how simple and smooth a blogspot is.

And how secure: it can be private.

How searchable, if she adds labels.

How aesthetically pleasing the process is as well as the product.

How editable.

How safe, preserved by Google.

Seeing is believing. I don't have a mission here, I just thought it might help her.

And sure enough, she's started one. Right now it'll be the last thing on her mind, as she's all bandaged up and groggy in a neat white hospital bed. But next week, she'll get to love her blog, I'm sure.

Photo by Labnol.

Good morning, world

2010-03-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

I woke late (6.40 a.m.) after a gorgeous sleep, and a thought floated into my mind. I suspect it was prompted by a comment from a philosophical taxi driver yesterday.

"What a wonderful day. I'm alive, I'm here, I'm now, I'm me."

A positive thought but what a self-centred one. Still, it's true: lucky lucky me.

I went to do tai chi on my deck — which I associate with another, far superior thought. Not my own thought, but I own it nevertheless.

"Good morning world. I am still with you!"

How sly. How delicious.

These were the first words every day of the elderly, eccentric hero of Noel Virtue's novel, The Redemption of Elsdon Bird.

Teaching Granny to do cartwheels

2010-03-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

So, here we are at WOMAD, World Music 2010 at beautiful Pukekura Park in New Plymouth.

My granddaughter loved it all, 8 hours of music in a single day. Here she is teaching me how to do cartwheels, as they do.

Age is not an issue at WOMAD. All the generations are gloriously jumbled up, on stage and off. Feral New Zealand is there, gentle, timeless hippies in their patchwork skirts and orange trousers, teens in self-protective clumps, suit types like me having fun in our own way, parents wheeling prams -- the lot. It was a lovely, colourful, rich experience in slow motion.

It's nice being slimmer

2010-03-16T12:46:00.001-07:00

I just want to note that I'm enjoying being lighter and slimmer. I plan to be that way forever more after realising the impact on my blood pressure.

After two months on my new regime, I went back for a BP check. The nurse's jaw literally dropped, just like my numbers: down from 160/70 to 125/70. "Like an 18-year-old," she lied. But it's good, easily good enough.

Seems the first 5-10 kilo weight loss can reduce blood pressure significantly, regardless of how large you are to begin with. I think I can see why: the heart has much less work to do.

For the record, I weigh around 7 kilos less than I did in my orange bathing togs, when nobody perceived me as fat. Nor did I. But standards have changed, and the switch from stone to kilos has camouflaged the change.

I'm now around 56 kilo, which sounds quite light. But hey, 57 kilo is 9 stone, which sounds heavy to me! That was my weight as a 16-year-old and I was hefty compared with my friends. OK, hour-glass figure, but no sylph.

Anyway I'm getting accustomed to a new improved me. It's been absurdly easy to lose weight: two weeks on the Atkins diet followed by a normal eating. I just swallow less (especially white carbs, wine and coffee). When I'm out I enjoy anything from passionfruit pavlova to bacon and egg butties.

Mind you, I never wanted to be skinny: scraggy neck, I thought — brittle bones — wrinkles.

But to my surprise I'm really enjoying the difference.

At dance warm-ups I can bend further forward on the floor: no spare (tractor) tyre.
I feel more supple and bouncy.
My morning walks up Mt Victoria are a bit easier.
Clothes look much much much much better now. It's cool.

All round I feel heaps better and calmer.

Anyway, no need for beta blockers. (I've got nothing against beta blockers, just preferably not yet thanks.)

Some oddities: even my watch strap and shoes are looser.

And most people don't even notice I've lost weight, which is fine by me.

Enough of this boring talk! What on earth brought that on? Be well.

2 bikes in the bedroom

2010-03-06T14:41:00.000-08:00

What a day yesterday was! My friend Jenny had lent me her son's mountain bike, so I could train more realistically for the Otago Rail Trail bike ride next month. About 9a.m. I set off and rode from Oriental Bay to Hataitai, around the harbour front.

Beautiful blue harbour, with a sliver of sun on the far shore. Happy walkers and riders. It's great whizzing along in the fresh air. I was an instant convert. All my previous reservations were swept away in one short hour. I came home glowing and went to Onyerbike to buy a new bicycle for my very own.

1. Dare I ride in traffic? Sure, it's flat riding all the way around the bays, mainly on the footpath.

2. Weather: given Wellington's notorious wild weather, how many days a year could I use a bike without being blown off? Answer: who cares if I bike only 6 days a year? Multiply that by 10 or 15 years and it's worth the expense.

3. Storage: getting a bike into the back shed is painful. Move wheelie bin, unlock shed, jostle with 2 other bikes. Wrestle bike on to a ceiling hook. Answer: carry it upstairs to my apartment and stick it in the walk-in linen cupboard.

4. But won't a bike be too heavy to carry up the stairs? Answer: na! I can handle that, especially on the new SUB (Sarah Ullmer Bike) bike, which is only 12.2 kilos.

Both bikes are now inside, until Jenny takes her Giant mountain bike home. My new bike is a SUB Lime, step through, hybrid, upright position. I can cycle with my head upright, looking at people and scenery and street signs. Perfect!

All my SUB Lime needs is a basket on the front and it will look almost like a genuine old fashioned old-lady bicycle with modern engineering. Old ladies biking want to sit upright, not double over the handlebars with our heads down.

Around Christchurch we used to see old ladies on their bikes all their long lives. My Great Aunt Bim, for example. It was part of their life, and there was no reason to get off their bikes just because they hit 60 or 70 or 80.

Biking doesn't have to be hell for leather up and down mountains or around a race track, delightful as those are for some. For old ladies, it's about going somewhere and enjoying the ride.

Birthday gifts for a 70-year-old

2010-03-01T19:33:00.001-08:00

What do you give a woman on her 70th birthday? Why, lipstick and a pedicure, of course.

My clever sisters sent me luxury gifts of immediate usefulness. I wore the bright pink lipstick on stage for the Crows Feet show. And all that dancing left me in dire need of a delicious pedicure. Thanks, Penny, Prue and Lesley!

70 years old at last

2010-02-26T12:59:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday I finally turned 70. It did seem like a significant birthday, more so than almost any other. Even turning 21 was not a big deal, because by then I was married and travelling in a train across (then) Yugoslavia: I felt frightfully mature. As you do!

But 70... the age my mother died, having programmed herself to do so at "three score years and ten". Some years back I observed that in their seventies, people often became fragile, their skin transparent, their gait uncertain, their vision restricted to a narrow circle. That was rather frightening.

Key phrase: "some years back". Looking at today's septuagenarians, I wouldn't dream of making any such generalisation. Nowadays, this is what 70 looks like!

The photo is me on my birthday, in costume for the current show by Crows Feet Dance Collective: "How to be a Domestic Goddess -- La Revue de Cuisine". After rehearsal I was seriously surprised by a little party. (I mean we're all focused on the show, who would remember a birthday?) Champagne and chocolate cake and flowers from the women who are my inspiration.

Back to the philosophical musings: in my case, the real difference between 70 and 69 is a deep and daily appreciation of how lucky I am to live now, here, with these people in my life, with these opportunities at my fingertips. I intend to relish every minute.

Photo: Elizabeth Isaac

Launching Scarlet Heels: 26 Stories About Sex

2010-02-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

Hooray! It's Valentine's Day, the official date for launching my new book:

Scarlet Heels: 26 Stories About Sex

Frankly, I wrote this book by accident, and yet of all the books I've written it's my favourite.

OK, favourites change over time, but I feel strangely fond of this one. When I think about Scarlet Heels, I feel affectionate, amused and carefree. I've got nothing to lose. This book is... like a member of my family.

Some of the stories are fictional versions of secrets whispered to me by women aged from 16 to 84. They were so excited, so alive as they talked about a sexual event that was significant to them in some particular way. Other stories are based on memories and hunches about women I've known.

And I kind of love all these women, from Anna, Beryl and Caroline to Xianthe the geeky schoolgirl, Yvette who finds Mr Available, and Zoe, who revives her lost libido to please her husband.

At 3pm this afternoon, six friends and I will quietly — or noisily — raise a glass of champagne in a beautiful garden. We'll eat apple cake and strawberries, I might read a few love poems, and we'll relish the moment.

I had no idea what people would think of this book, but they seem to be enjoying it heaps. So far, critics have called it a darling little book, great, great fun, and happy. They find two or three of the 26 stories steamy, which is about what I hoped. Trust me, this is popular fiction, not erotica.

Now, here's a reward for reading this far.

To celebrate the launch I'm giving away five copies of Scarlet Heels.

To enter the competition, just comment on this blog post.

Give me a reason why you of all people deserve a free copy. The five people with the most convincing reasons will be the winners.

Deadline: Saturday 20 February 2010, 10am New Zealand time.

The 5-Minute Meditator

2010-02-11T14:40:00.000-08:00

I'm a born again meditator, for health reasons. My first port of call is this book:
The 5-minute meditator by Eric Harrison

This is a favourite book with a refreshing approach. Eric Harrison has heavy duty credentials as a lifelong practitioner and ex-Buddhist monk, but his mission is to make meditation possible where it's needed most: not in a solitary wilderness, but in the city, in the office, in marriage, in hospital. His teaching is jargon free and not allied to any one tradition.

He explains practical, highly specific ways to relax your mind and body any time, any place, just for a few seconds or minutes. I'm trying to do this. While it's not easy, it sure is heaps easier than conforming to waffly advice like being in the moment.

One of his tips: Do what you're doing. If you're washing the dishes, just do that — without simultaneously planning your day or tackling a problem in your head. Just look at what you're doing, feel the water, admire the plates, notice your hand movements, and so on.

I'm keen to make headway on calming my busy brain, because I'm starting to understand that an older body cannot handle stress as well as a young one. This is a brand new thought, for me. After all, I'm strong and healthy, I love my work, I've got heaps of energy. And yet small things bring me more stress than seems logical. It's a change.

I'm not surprised when I get stressed by tasks like reorganising web files. Naturally I'm stressed when changing php and css files because that's downright dangerous— especially when I'm just winging it.

On the other hand, sometimes I notice myself feeling pressured when doing an easy Code Cracker puzzle! Now that's ridiculous.

All the more reason to meditate.

I buy 10 copies of this lovely book at a time and give them away to friends in need.

My first old-lady ailment

2010-02-11T14:04:00.000-08:00

So. It's official. I've got an actual medical problem that is plain and simple the result of my age. What took you so long?

After years of low or normal blood pressure, about a month ago I discovered it's gone up rather too much. I need medication, but my doctor agreed to wait 6 months while I try and tease the BP downwards by other methods.

1. Lose weight. I started by losing 5 kilos through two weeks on the Atkins diet. That's the first time I've ever dieted in my entire life, which probably made it easy. Now I've changed my eating habits in sensible but not neurotic ways. Seems to be working fine. Luckily I love my veges.

2. Exercise more. I upped to 30-40 minutes every day, regardless of the weather. An exercycle is the extra factor besides dancing and walking.

3. Meditate religiously twice a day for 20 minutes.

4. Reduce workload and stress factors. This is surprisingly hard, because I love doing what I'm doing and I've got a ton of energy. Guess I should just do less.

I'd hate to start banging on about my little tiny ailments, because that's what (notoriously) old people do: compare symptoms and treatments.

Still, the blog is about growing older, that's the deal.

How to look young at 70

2010-01-29T12:56:00.000-08:00

The other day, at a wedding, my lovely brother-out-law said to me in a mystified voice, three times:

"You look young."

He was trying to puzzle out how and why this should be.

Heaps of our generation were at the wedding, and heaps of us do look young. That's the era we live in. But what sets the young 70s apart from the old-old 70s?

When you look at a 15-year-old, they never look 5 years old. Never. When you look at a 30-year-old, they never look 10. And yet many a 70-year-old does look 60 or 50 years old. How do we do it?

Most of it (90%?) is good luck. That can change in an hour, with an accident or disease or death in the family. (And just quietly, on some days we look 100.) Good genes are sheer luck. It's luck that my parents fed me properly. Luck that I'm a middle class New Zealander, not struggling in rural China.

But there's still stuff we can actually do, at any age, that make us look younger. And it's true that people quite often ask me why I seem younger than my years.

People usually say it's attitude, it's all in the mind. "Young at heart" is what matters.

Clearly a zest for life is important. But often if you change something on the outside, the inside changes too. Isn't that amazing?

If you're feeling sad and defeated, try simply changing one little habit: this you can do. We older people do get fixed in our ways. You might be very surprised at the chain of happy events that result from one small change to your behaviour.

So here are my tips for older women who want to appear younger.

1. Smile. Smile often. Smile for no reason. Smile at strangers. A smiling face is a younger face.

2. Stand up as straight as you can. Long neck, shoulders relaxed and down. This gives you a younger shape, a more positive stature... and attitude.

3. When you walk, look around you. Move your body freely. Bounce along, swing along. This creates a youthful feeling inside you, and a youthful impression to observers.

4. If your neck is stuck, get it unstuck. For me this is a constant struggle but two things have paid off big time: Tai chi, several times a week; and cranial-osteopathy. You want a head that balances on the spine, not one that's welded to your spine. Young people move their heads.

5. Hitch up your tits, whether they're beanbags or hackysacks. Wear decent, properly fitted bras. This gives you breasts and a waist, like young women tend to have. If that's just an illusion, so what? Celebrate the illusion.

6. Do not wear beige. It makes you invisible, and young people are never invisible. Do not wear black near your face. It makes you look like a corpse. (The Gothic look only suits the chronologically young.)

7. Buy and wear some clothes that are fun or fashionable. Enjoy them. Read fashion magazines. Believe it, some of those things would suit you.

8. Wear makeup. You are beautiful, but some people can't see it because of your skin. Find a lipstick you can live with: that looks better, ay? Discover the clever-clogs concealer, and always wear blusher. Yes, I mean it—blusher!

9. Use a magnifying mirror to spot those telltale hairs growing into a horse's tail under your chin. You'll hate what you see. But you'll love the peace of mind, which is a feature of mindless youth.

10. Pay attention to your hair. When it gets thin or doggy, hair is a dead giveaway for age. Colour's not necessarily an issue. But style needs a new thought: the old style probably won't work any more.

I relish every minute of being one of the young-old. We know we're lucky, this new tribe. So let's bounce around the world with joy. As I said, our luck can change in a flash. How wicked to moan and groan when we are so lucky.

P.S. I cheated with the photo. I was then only 68 and a half, a mere baby. On holiday in Coolum, Sunshine Coast, Queensland.

Touchy about hearing loss

2010-01-29T12:18:00.000-08:00

It's funny how people tend to be much more sensitive about damage to hearing than about impaired eyesight.

I certainly include myself in this over-sensitive group! Cheerfully I admit to hearing loss. Proudly I wear my cunning little Phonax hearing aids. But poke me the wrong way and I'll still bristle with indignation.

Partly, I'm reacting to another funny thing about human nature: I've noticed that the more defensive people are about their own hearing, the more they are likely to comment on other people's hearing.

(Obviously, I include myself in this over-sensitive group.)

So when a person with poor hearing, aware they should have bought hearing aids yesterday, comments on my poor hearing, logic flees. These two people are incapable of having a sensible conversation on the topic of hearing, because rumbling under the spoken words are other powerful silent messages, such as...

"Your hearing is worse than my hearing."
"You need hearing aids."
"Pot calling the kettle black."

And our hearing gets worse and worse. Neither of us can bear to listen to the other person.

During one such exchange recently, a sister had to step in and tell us two deafish persons to drop the subject. We were talking about two different things (on the surface) and the conversation was going nowhere.

Hearing sensitivity had rolled us right into social ineptness. Stupidity. Craziness. Rudeness.

This is kind of weird, don't you think? I never pick up on similar vibes about eyesight. Maybe that's just me. I love glasses. If you've got it (poor eyesight), flaunt it—like Dame Edna Everage.

Oops, forgot the Christmas tree

2009-12-19T13:12:00.001-08:00

So this one went up in 5 minutes. Call me Cheating Granny. But it does the job.

Old people know too much

2009-12-18T20:46:00.000-08:00

Recently I had some rest and recreation with my five sisters on Kapiti Island. As you see from the photo, it was relaxing. And we hardly stopped laughing for 48 hours.

A recurring problem recurred. People who have lived six or seven decades know pretty much everything. So how can we refrain from giving advice willy nilly?

Over two days I was advised (among other things) to buy a chihuahua, lose all interest in my appearance, get a bum-bra for my saggy bottom, and review the prescription for topical chemotherapy I'm using on my nose. Some of these tips were useful, others not so much.

It's only a problem because I am inclined to presume I know best. (The only people who really annoy me are people just like me.) So I took special notice of those who managed to give me advice that I enjoyed. I resolve sincerely try harder to be like them -- wish me luck! Kind. Light-hearted. Curious.

Whether you're 70, 7 or 17, it's nice to be treated with respect... but not too much respect...

An extremely old woman

2009-12-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

Our grandmother, known as Mim, used to look after Penny (aged 3 or 4) while Mother was teaching.

One day she popped Penny on top of the sideboard to remove her from some mischief. Penny was furious, and hurled her deadliest insult in revenge:

"You're an extremely old woman and you look like one!"

Unfortunately for the effect, Mim thought this was so funny that it became a standing joke. She began to sign family letters as ye anciente Mim, and refer to herself as this extremely old woman.

How old was that extremely old woman at the time, I wonder? In her 50s?

R.I.P. Gloria, 10 months old

2009-12-09T12:58:00.000-08:00

Friends die at different ages: that's obvious. We prefer it if they die after a fine and satisfying life. We prefer their lives to be long, and end well.

I'm just going to the vet right now to say goodbye to Gloria. Her life has been easy, as my supervisor and trainer, with her own en suite bathroom and sufficient food and water. It has been useful, as she has provided me with instructions, guidance, and somebody warm to stroke. But it has not been long.

Another friend, Jamie, calls cats "angels in fur coats".

Goodbye, Gloria, and thank you.

Feline Infectious Peritonitis, according to Wikipedia

Hollywood stars panic at age 42

2009-11-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

I read in our paper that Hollywood stars start to panic about being unemployable because of old age at about... 42.

But 42 is the meaning of life! Get over it.

Old lady loves working

2009-11-12T20:26:00.000-08:00

Why would I stop working, when I love it, I'm good at it, and it's useful?

Some people just don't get it. They assume that every old lady would rather stop working, or work less. Why? Maybe they think I don't enjoy work. Or that work makes me tired. Or that work stops me from doing more fun things.

But there's nothing I'd rather do with the bulk of my week than work.

I'm not a workaholic or a perfectionist. My work is balanced by plenty of people time, granny time, me time. I dance, walk, socialise, read books, write books (for fun), watch TV and go to movies. I travel and have holidays.

No doubt the world is full of other exciting things I could be doing. So let other people do them.

Old lady loves new frocks

2009-11-12T16:15:00.000-08:00

What do old ladies want? New frocks!

Among the saddest words old ladies say are these: "It'll see me out."

As your world shrinks, no need to go boring! An 88-year-old may need to forgo those 4-inch scarlet heels, but she can still wear a stylish frock. It's a joy to see a really old lady looking great.

As an incipient old lady I was thrilled to buy these two dresses last week. I mean frocks: that's a much nicer word! It's even more exciting because from 15-35 I made my own frocks, and for many years I bought most of my clothes second-hand.

Like many women, I have a secret fabric fetish. We FF-Femmes have a stash of fabric in the wardrobe. See it, love it, buy it, pretend we're going to make it into a frock one day. Yeah, right. My stash includes two lengths from Samoa: a wild orange and yellow polished cotton and red cotton with giant white leaves; plus green silk with multi-coloured splashes.

So, three weddings coming up soon! I felt that justified something new and frivolous, so I went to town intending to buy a pattern. But I diverted to Alexandra Owen's shop, where I bought a super high fashion origami dress in stark French navy cotton. Divine: it revealed my (well) hidden shape. It's an heirloom piece and an incentive to stay alive and sociable: my daughters will have to wait a few decades.

From this splendid accident I learned nothing. I went to town two days later on the same mission: find a dress pattern. This time I dropped into Frutti in Cuba Street and succumbed to an irresistible piece of flowery silk froth, light as a butterfly and crazy with it. The designer, Maiangi Waiti, was inspired by the dresses that old ladies wear. Perfect.

alexandraowen.co.nz
Maiangi Waiti on Facebook

"Scarlet Heels" comes a little closer

2009-11-09T14:14:00.000-08:00

This week I'll get my new book to to the book designer. I'm sorting out a copyright statement, which I intend to be pretty radical. Creative Commons for a paper printed book? Unheard of! But then many things about this book are crazy to the point of being reckless, including the cover photo of this old lady. :-) More later.

Advance publicity about "Scarlet Heels: 26 Stories About Sex" on the publisher's web site:
http://ccpress.info/scarletheels.htm

Grandparents is not a synonym for elderly

2009-11-01T23:07:00.001-08:00

This headline appeared in the Dominion Post, 19 October 2009:
Surfing's good for grandparents.

First sentence:

Internet use can boost the brain activity of the elderly, potentially slowing or even reversing the age-related declines that can end in dementia, researchers found.

The study was by Gary Small, professor of neuroscience and human behaviour at UCLA,and his colleagues. The results are fascinating, but they have nothing to do with grandparents. Possibly some of the 24 people studied were grandparents, as they were aged between 55 and 78. Possibly not.

The journalist, I'm guessing, was not of grandparenting age. Otherwise he or she would have noticed that:

not everyone over 55 is a grandparent
variables among subjects concerned age and internet use, not grandparenting
the scientists used the terms older people and older adults, not grandparents.

First-time internet users find boost in brain function after just one week
P.S. Tim Jones points out that not all people over 55 are grandparents, either. A friend of his was a grandmother at 34.

Frances Hodgkins, artist: portrait by Jan Bolwell

2009-10-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

Frances Hodgkins, artist. Sounds straightforward? By no means! She was born in colonial Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1869, and died in 1947 aged 78.

J.C. Beaglehole explains why her achievements were so significant, her lifetime struggle so fraught.

n a new play, Double Portrait: Finding Frances Hodgkins, Jan Bolwell shows this very private woman convincingly and movingly. A small play paints a big psychological portrait with colour, shape, light and shade.

DOUBLE PORTRAIT: Finding Frances Hodgkins is coming to the New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Shed 11, Wellington Waterfront.
November 27, November 28 at 6pm, December 4, December 5 at 6pm.Bookings at Downstage Theatre www.downstage.org.nz 4 shows only.

Frances Hodgkins' works in the Tate Gallery

Antipodes: irresistible domestic travelogue

2009-10-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

Maybe you noticed an old lady gently colliding with a magnolia tree and a concrete power pole today. Maybe you noticed those orange-clad hole-diggers leaping away from her trajectory in alarm. Maybe you wondered what book had her so fixated that she was blind and deaf to her surroundings. She was not living in the moment but in a new book.

OK, that was me, and the book was Antipodes: the Ingenious and Exhilarating Expedition of El Lider and La Campana by Mark Price. (Sorry, I can't do macrons or squiggles over the n of Campana. I hope I haven't ruined the effect.)

The premise: A "modestly capable man" plans a modestly capable adventure, exploring the antipodes of 20 "Perfect Places" in his own antipodes, namely New Zealand.

The execution: Perfect Prose. Darling Deadpan. Magnificently ego-free travel writing, with happy whiffs of Toad Hall, Three Men in a Boat and Louis de Bernière's recent charmer, Nothwithstanding.

As I read and walked simultaneously, proving yet again that I'm a woman of many talents, I noticed my stride had a floating, lolloping quality, echoing the rhythm of Mark Price's good plain English.

Sheer pleasure inside a satisfying cardboard cover.

Half of today's wealthy babies will live past 100: study

2009-10-20T14:46:00.001-07:00

Half wealthy nations' newborns could live to 100, according to a recent Danish study.

Hard to believe! And it hasn't happened yet. Disbelief bubbles up automatically because this notion clashes wildly with the current state of affairs:

Only about one in 10,000 people lives to be over 100 years old, says Niz Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

That quote's from "20 things you didn't know about ageing" on Montrealgazette.com -- but I can't tell how old the story is, can you?

The wellderly and the illderly: these two new words stress the gulf between one 70- or 80-year-old and the next. I think I was born in a brilliant era, with so much information and choices to supplement the sheer luck of the genes.

Old age? Bring it on!

Mosaic numbers by Duncan on Flickr

Anna and Grace: maturing in style

2009-09-22T16:38:00.000-07:00

The September Issue was great value, as movies go.
A. Fashionating scene: life inside Vogue magazine.
B. Hokey pokey icecream.
C. Two inspiring women, Anna Wintour at 59 and Grace Coddington at 68.

I could describe in some detail every outfit that Anna Wintour wore in the film. Half my brain was thinking, I could wear that, I couldn't wear that -- and mentally revamping my own wardrobe.

I bet thousands of older women have upgraded their look after seeing just how good a working woman of 59 can look. We don't necessarily have quite the same budget, but thanks to Trinny and Susannah we can analyse the components of the look. (Colour. Shape. Fitted cardigans. Knee length patterned skirts. Necklace, etc.) And adapt.

As for Grace Coddington, she deliberately chooses a self-effacing style. I think she wore the same comfortable dress, or perhaps a maroon variation? throughout the film. But I couldn't swear to that because, as she intended, I really didn't look at her clothes.

Neither wore jeans, a fleece, or beige.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple (or red)

2009-09-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

At the market today I saw a friend wearing a red silk chiffon blouse. She looked stunning. She too is nearly 70. One of the new breed of old ladies -- the ones who look young.

"I splashed out," said Robyn. "It cost a fortune. What do you think?"

"It looks gorgeous," I said.

"I had to have some colour."

"Yes, we old ladies must wear colour," I proselytised. "We can't wear black or we all look like Greek widows. And we can't wear beige or we all look the same: generic old ladies, interchangeable -- see one, seen the lot."

Then I looked down at what I was wearing.

Black skivvy... Beige trousers...Oops.

I did have red shoes on, if that counts, and orange spectacle frames.

Jenny Joseph's "Warning" contains some excellent beauty advice but it's a big mind shift for Wellington women.

For decades Wellington women wear black -- funky black, arty black, op-shop black, Zambesi black or chain-store black. As a look it's endlessly versatile. What-to-wear decisions are simple. And you always fit in.

Then one day you wake up and your skin has mysteriously lost its rosy glow. Arty black becomes bag-lady black. Op-shop black makes you shudder. High Street black becomes tacky black. And even Zambesi black makes you look like a sophisticated corpse.

That's the reason why Jenny Joseph, clever young lady that she was, knew at the age of 29 that when she grew old she would wear purple and red.

- - - - -

Zambesi
Jenny Joseph's "Warning"
The photo is the beautiful Aunt Polly of one George Perry. His web site has no copyright notice or contact details except for a US phone number.

Left hand writing and right hand writing

2009-09-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

Writing with your non-habitual hand is an easy, interesting way to trigger the brain to behave differently.

This is old, old information. I'd use it in writing groups: we'd all write with our left hands (or right, for lefties) for 10 minutes. Often, people were astonished by the words they wrote: apparently an alien had done the writing. Liberating, it was.

Well, I hadn't done that for years. But recently, as part of the save-my-brain-campaign, I've started writing shopping lists and such with my left hand.

The content doesn't surprise me. It's still the same old shopping list:
bread
yoghurt
coffee
oranges
iPhone
character dancing shoes
and so forth.

The surprise is in the writing style. Much more legible than my normal writing, which has been out of control for decades. More rounded and childlike, less pointy and mean. A little similar to my father's writing.

If the alien takes over, what will my shopping lists look like then?

The rag rug dilemma: old lady artefact

2009-09-03T14:03:00.001-07:00

So, there's this little handcrafted rag rug in my bathroom. Made by my own fair hands, about 16 years ago. I was doing some housework this morning. (Alarm! Alarm! Subject exhibits unusual behaviour!) So I took the rug upstairs to the deck and gave it a good thrashing in the morning sunshine.

Many cultures thrash their duvets and their rugs. This adds percussion to the morning music of neighbourhoods all over the world. So I don't blame myself for what happened next.

Namely, bits of the rug fell off and fell out and blew into the garden next door, and the street, and probably the CBD. It had reached stage 5 of the rag rug cycle: not only had the pieces of rag worked loose, the very backing had begun to rot.

A tear came to my eye. (Not.) No truly, I felt a bit nostalgic. The rug depicts Lowry Bay, a tiny elite Wellington neighbourhood where I had a nice calm few years between turbulent decades.

So calm, indeed, that I made quite a few rag rugs. That's a soothing hobby, and laudably economical. All you need is a canvas backing, a few old woollen coats from the op shop, a rug hook and a pair of scissors. And time.

Oh yes, and space. Those bags of ripped up strips of cloth take space. In fact once I lived in a house with another rug maker: her bags of fabric occupied a room the size of a scout hall. That's why I no longer make rag rugs.

So now comes the dilemma. Do I:
1. throw the rug away? (one day)
2. spray clean it, and hang on a few more months? (probably)
3. get it professionally cleaned and mended? (naa)
4. build a museum to preserve this precious artefact?

But the irony amuses me. For this rug is quite a sweet little artefact in its own right, quite apart from my nostalgia.

It's an old lady artefact, the kind of rug my mother-in-law-number-two used to make and give to the privileged few. I'll be an old lady in February. Maybe I should build up to that by making another rag rug.

Save my brain - learn Hamlet

2009-09-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

As part of the great Save My Brain Campaign I decided to do some rote learning. But what to learn?

Taking the laziest option, I chose Hamlet's first soliloquy: O that this too, too solid flesh would melt...Laziest? Because that's what my grandmother used to recite to maintain her formidable brainpower.

So I did. It took me a verrrrry long time, a week. (Young actors can get a whole script down in that time.) And now I need to keep repeating it, to nail it into my long-term memory. If I have such a thing, at my age.

The process is pretty interesting. You have to get it absolutely right, complete with all the syllable-fillers such as "Fie on't! Ah, fie!" and "God! Oh God!" and "Heaven and earth!" And it's those bits where I hesitate sometimes, Alas! woe is me!

Interestingly, the speech seems to get shorter and shorter. As I get more confident (sometimes racing through like R2D2), I'm inclined to stop and think (always fatal). I think, "Surely I can't have reached that bit already? I must have missed a line."

Morning and night I say this mournful, desperate speech in my mind. I imagine my mind has already begun working more lightly and quickly. That's absurd, surely. And incongruous, because the speech itself is the ultimate in neurotic despair.

That's why I'm moving away from Hamlet. A friend suggested the psalms. Great idea. But of course, I'll be picky. None of those doom and gloom and apolocalyptic psalms for me.

Grandchildren's poems

2009-09-01T14:53:00.001-07:00

One of the amazing privileges of being older -- a privilege not granted to everyone -- is being a grandparent. I have three grandchildren. Three!!! How lucky is that? They're all fabulous.

Younger people read that paragraph and move hastily away: ho hum,boring, banal. Only grandparents understand this life-changing miracle.

Elsie (6) lives in my town, so every Monday and Wednesday I run down the hill to her school and whisk her back to my apartment for a couple of hours.

Sometimes I write down what she says, knock off the edges and call it a poem. In fact I hardly bother to write my own poems any more, because (like every child I've ever known) Elsie says enough wise, fanciful, crazy and musical things for both of us. Here's what came out of Elsie's mouth on Monday.

Morning is pink

Morning is pink
(says Elsie).

If it's pink, it's morning.
And if it's not pink,

you have to go back to sleep
for a long, long time.

To an old lady laughing, this also seems like a short meditation on death.

Read more of Elsie's poems on C-for-Blog.blogspot.com

Aging women: if you don't laugh, you'll cry (NYT)

2009-08-24T20:16:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times looks at More magazine, aimed at women over 40.

Stephanie Clifford points out that a magazine whose organizing principle, aging, provokes anxiety among its readers, has an inescapable challenge.

“Don’t take it seriously,” Lesley Jane Seymour, the editor in chief of More, said in a recent interview. “We’re making fun of ourselves. We don’t take aging seriously. It happens to everyone. You can’t avoid it.”

More certainly does not. Age infiltrates almost every article, and while it is a touchy subject for readers, advertisers are wary about it as well. More’s average reader is 51, among the oldest in the magazine business, making selling ads a challenge, More executives say. While it tackles ageism in its pages, it is getting a good dose of it from advertisers.

Advertisers show the same blind spots as I mentioned in my last blog:

[Advertisers] penalize the magazine because its readers are female. The More reader makes a lot more than the average reader of Esquire, at about $66,800, and GQ, at about $75,100. But where GQ, Esquire, and the younger women’s magazines are filled with ads for designer clothes, fragrances and expensive accessories, the ads in More suggest that when rich women hit 40, they yearn for cheap processed foods.

Grr!

Marketing to old people: aesthetics

2009-08-22T17:48:00.001-07:00

Thinking further about why stuff that is marketed to old people is usually so ugly...

My parents' generation had little choice. In New Zealand, imports were restricted and variety non-existent. Everyone had the same things, pretty much. Shopping for household goods, the choice was between ugly and less ugly.

No, that's too mean. I'm very fond of memories from the home of my parents-in-law: bevelled edge mirrors, pink china shepherdesses, multi-coloured crocheted afghans, speckled green cups and saucers, net curtains, pink candlewick bedspreads and altogether a plain, plain interior.

My grandmother Mim had charming, exquisite tea sets in Royal Albert bone china, and a dresser of Mason ware for everyday use. Raising six girls on a few hundred pounds per year, my mother served tea from a silver teapot. The women of our low-income family made their few house-ware purchases with pride and focus. They longed for beautiful things — but choice was minimal and money tight.

Then in the 50s and 60s, things changed. My big sister Jill also had to be acutely careful with money, but with an astute eye for beauty she was able to buy elegant things, simple and streamlined. The home of Jill and Graham, two penniless students with four children, gleamed with Poole Pottery twintone china (as in the photo) and Danish styled furniture.

Now what puzzles me here is that today, in 2009, marketers still use a fake Edwardian style in the goods they market to older people. We get a catalogue in our letter boxes called "Innovations". (Whoever thought up that name had a sense of humour.) It features fascinating, and often bizarre, and usually unnecessary, items for older people.

Often the wood is carved or the iron twisted into curlicues. Linen is embroidered in cross stitch.

That's all very well, but the people who are hitting 70 nowadays have lived a lifetime in homes with some variety and charm. So they're marketing to old, old people. Or maybe dead people. Wake up, marketers! We do not want that yukky stuff.

The cruel aesthetics of old people's stuff

2009-08-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

As you get old, you need old people's stuff. Great design never seems to be a priority. In fact, much old people's stuff looks repulsive.

Take shower mats. Old people slip in the shower, right? Solution: a rubber mat that grips the slippery wet base, and that responds to the grip of your dear old toes.

Trouble is, shower mats, like so much old people's stuff, are usually ugly or boring or so boring they are ugly. More than ugly: vile, hideous, disgusting. Colours are modelled on slimy old pink nighties or the dreaded beige raincoat. Lumps in the rubber are like serious acne or boils. The texture sets your teeth on edge.

So OK, I did slip in the shower recently, the first time ever. Wham! Maybe it was a oncer. Maybe it was because I was simultaneously stepping into the shower and mentally listing the jobs of the next 90 minutes. (1. Shower & dress etc. 2. Finish packing. 3. Run to computer shop for replacement netbook cable. 4. Call taxi. 5. Catch plane to Tonga.)

Regardless, if you live alone, best not muck around with risk.

On my return I bought a handsome shower mat from Moore Wilson. It combines the beauties of a chess board, space age jelly, and a crystal prism twinkling in the sun. In the structure I see two extremes in harmony: post-modern industrial steel and the Tofukuji moss garden in Kyoto. Aesthetically I'm satisfied.

And for the next week I owned another beautiful image as an impressive bruise flickered through various permutations of blue, black, yellow and green. Nature's painting on my bum.

This blog: on the cards for 60 years

2009-08-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a weird thing that happened when I was a kid, about the same age as in this photo. (That's me, third from the left, with my sisters.) I said something to my mother that shocked her to the bones.

"I can't wait to die!" I said excitedly. I wasn't being morbid but enthusiastic.

Mother looked so horrified that I hastened to explain.

"I don't want to die yet!" I assured her. "But I just think it will be so interesting."

It's true I was secretly attracted to the hypothetical concept of dying young. But above all I thought the process would be fascinating, especially discovering what happens after you die.

To be honest, nowadays I'm not half so enthusiastic about the prospect of dying. On the other hand, I am still extremely interested, or I wouldn't be writing this blog.

Lost word of the day: cyclamen

2009-08-14T15:04:00.000-07:00

I bought this terrific pot plant at the supermarket, which survived my absence without water for a week. I buy a cyclamen roughly once a decade. This morning, a brief moment of forgetting the name.

I'm trying to see a pattern here. Tonga, cyclamen...

Exotic colourful things?

Rarely used, unfamiliar words? Sure, this trip to Tonga with a friend was a very casually arranged holiday: we just picked a cheap destination, did almost no homework or preparation, and when the time came, popped on the plane. It was a frivolous case of This is Wednesday so it must be Tonga.

But no, there's no provocation to forget these particular words. They are worthy, deserving words that could be handy in the future. They do not deserve to be lost.

One rule: the word I forget is always a noun.

Just like on those annoying moments when I hesitate over a word, and others (dum de dum de dum, bo-o-oring) supply it. I feel like a walking — but not talking — old-lady join-the-dots puzzle. I could replace sudoku as the next great puzzle for the masses with my hesitations.

I'm not starting work yet. I'm going downstairs for coffee and sudoku.

Where am I? Memory flickering

2009-08-14T14:36:00.001-07:00

It's happened a thousand times to me, and probably to you: that word you wanted just slithers away like a whitebait. You have to trick it into returning to its cage of axons; you have to pretend you don't care, and ambush it later. It's usually lurking there somewhere.

Now that doesn't matter if it's a word like axons which you use rarely because you have never been a brain surgeon and the only brain you work with is your own.

But what happens if the name of an entire country escapes you — the country you are in? That's the sort of question doctors ask you after a head injury: Do you know what country this is?

On Day 2 of my holiday in Tonga I woke early and couldn't figure where I was. I could have confidently found it on a map, or told you it was a South Pacific island kingdom less than three hours' flight from New Zealand. But what was its name?

I lay there for (probably) several minutes unable to retrieve this significant little vocabulary fish from my memory. Could it be Tonga? I wondered. Tongatapu and Nukualofa slithered around without pushing Tonga to the surface. Tonga was in my mind, yet I couldn't quite connect the word to the place. Sheepishly I got up and confirmed my hunch by consulting a pamphlet: Yes, Tonga.

Then a truly scary moment came: for a few seconds, Tonga didn't quite convince me.

Whenever I travel, whether at 69 or 29, I'm likely to feel this disorientation in the early morning. You too? I assume it's quite common. After dawn we can use the sun's position to tell north from south and east from west, although even that can be tricky in a different hemisphere or on a ship or near the Antarctic. But at 5 a.m. in an unfamiliar bed, our location can be a mystery.

Nevertheless, I can't believe that losing Tonga is normal for younger people. It just might be normal for an old lady.

Might as well laugh about that, I suppose.

Old lady bike riding

2009-08-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

This week I'm holidaying in Tonga and riding bicycles is a great way to get around the small, flat island of Tongatapu. Yesterday my friend and I set out on the very sturdy bikes provided by the lovely Heilala Holiday Lodge.

Subtext in my mind... Can I still ride a bike? Can I ride one easily, without pain? Will I be fit for the 5-day Otago rail trail bike ride next year, planned as a 70th birthday celebration?

All my unspoken, nervous questions were answered: yes, yes and sure thing.

It helped, no doubt, that the bike's saddle was exceptionally wide and comfy.

As for fitness, I decided to use the Feldenkrais principles. To exert as little effort as possible. To experiment with unusual positions. (!) To let gravity and natural momentum carry me along.

And so it came to pass. The bicycle (that one, anyway) is a marvellous piece of engineering. The slightest effort keeps you rolling along. And hey, it was exhilarating! Wind in the hair, bouncing through potholes, skimming country roads through unknown territory. Even getting somewhat lost was fun.

We did have a destination and we got there: Keliti Beach, with pancake rocks, pounding waves, and mini-blowholes. But that's the least of it.

The first iPhone text

2009-07-28T12:42:00.001-07:00

This is my new iPhone. Very new. I have received my first text on it:

How's that gorgeous girl today? K

(That's from my daughter asking after her 6-year-old Elsie. I have the honour of Elsie's company twice a week after school.)

Good, well done Granny: you managed to read it. Top of the class.

Next step, to reply. Here's how it went:

Godgeeos
I can't spekil on this yet we did. Oloring in my god wo t a mess x

I know this will be a breeze within days. But day one of any new technology is inevitably humbling — even Apple. Fingers too big, don't know the controls, tantalised by the novel touch surface, and possibly even dazzled by the glamour after my humble brown Sony.

Meantime this is what I wrote before the pixies pixillated it. I did, honestly I did:

Gorgeous. I can't spell yet on this. We did colouring in. My God, what a mess. X.

Guess I'm not qwidA ready to send business texts afain yet. I'll stafg training tomootpwww.

Today's body shape, yesterday's posture

2009-07-21T22:12:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to remember if we had anything equivalent to today's body shape obsession when I was young.

Certainly our mother told us frequently to sit up straight, stand up straight and don't slump. Round shoulders were anathema. Posture seemed to be more a matter of manners than looking beautiful. Some people's idea of good posture was ill-conceived, too: they wanted us to look more like a chest-beating gorilla than a natural human being.

Nevertheless it was essentially good advice for beauty. Standing taller does improve the figure (and the morale), and it doesn't cost a cent.

We also paid attention to bust-waist-hip measurements, dreaming of the perfect (?) 34-24-34 hourglass figure. That's inches, of course. Very cute, but for me unattainable after the first pregnancy.

And I do remember in my teens being bothered by my hair. We used sugar and water instead of gel or foam. Yech, stiff and sticky. Three cheers for the pony tail, which required no control beyond a rubber band.

It's so crazy that women worry so much about beauty when we're young. I mean, almost everyone who gets three good feeds a day is breathtakingly beautiful when they're young. The young are gorgeous, they're all gorgeous, they can't help it. If only they knew it. But they look in the mirror and see not Angelina Jolie.

Nowadays I'm way past the point where plastic surgery could restore any part of my youthful beauty. But standing up straight still hints at an illusion of [comparative] youth. Thanks, Mother!

Aging rock star dog still rocks

2009-07-20T16:30:00.000-07:00

Book review:
Hairy Maclary, Shoo! by Lynley Dodd
Mallinson Rendel

Now Hairy Maclary’s
more fun than a fairy.
But you couldn’t say
Hairy Maclary was neat.

He’s the silliest, willingest
busiest, fizziest
merriest, hairiest
dog in the street.

Now the playingest, strayingest,
never-will-stay-in-est
rock star dog with millions of fans
has snuck inside a delivery van.

Parents and pensioners,
playboys and popes
all read about Hairy,
they all know the ropes.

Toddlers in rompers
and teenies in beanies
and mummies in gummies
and daddies in pinnies—

they shimmy and scrump
and jump and clap
to Hairy Maclary’s
canine rap.

And ticklish teachers
with flexible features
and pigeon-toed preachers
with polyglot screeches

and notable Nanas
in frilly pajamas
and unctuous uncles
with purple carbuncles

and clowns of all ages
are turning your pages,
and tropical birds
are pronouncing your words.

Maclary amuses and also confuses.
He gets in the brain with his sneaky refrain.
He tangles the axons,
collapses synapses,
And never gets out of the brain again.

So be off with you, old
Mister Hairy Maclary.
You’re now twenty six—
but you don’t need a fix.

We’re older too,
Mister Hairy Maclary,
and you make us feel tired
with your triplicate tricks.

We love your beginnings
we relish your ends.
but we’re so deep inside you
we’re getting the bends.

So off with you now
Mr Sociable Hairy.
Scarper, skedaddle,
get out of our heads.

We have budgets to balance
and projects to skewer.
We can’t stop and play,
we are far too mature.

We have menus to plan.
We have gardens to weed.
Your kind of madness
we just do not need.

So be off with you, books!
Get out of your boxes
and into the shops.
Go do what you do.

Go confuse, go amuse,
go cruise with the news.
Let the nation peruse.
Let the whole world schmooze.
Win-win-win-win.
You can’t lose.

Hairy Maclary, shoo!

Smiling sometimes still, with MS

2009-07-18T21:52:00.000-07:00

It's easy for me to be happy, because not only do I have the happy gene but I'm a hugely lucky person.

Not so my friend Diana Neutze, who has been stuck with multiple sclerosis for 40 years. Every day can be a nightmare, and many are.

At a certain point, Diana made a decision, a strategy, a plan. She would always try to be cheerful and entertaining when friends called. Otherwise they would stop calling. So visiting her is stimulating and fun, on one level.

It's a tricky one, because sometimes she simply has to vent, and most friends aren't able to receive this. Our natural urge is to deny that things are as bad as she says. That's crazy talk -- because A. Diana knows best, and B. Diana was dealt a very nasty hand.

The photo shows her receiving attention from one of her army of helpers, who's stretching muscles that otherwise cramp painfully. Things are much worse for her now.

Diana inspires me because she turns the whole hideous experience into a spiritual journey. For years she has treated physical disability as a series of problems to be solved, and an opportunity for spiritual growth. It's unbelievable.

Even now, she writes poems, using a voice programme and editing by ear alone. Here's one.

Different Song
“Surely, there is a different song.”

Yes, but you need to be a different person,
change through and through.
Not like going to a hair dresser
with a fancy photograph
and expecting the new hair style
to smooth away flabby skin and wrinkles
with one sweep of the comb.
The change must come from the inside out.

Like the inhabitants of Plato's cave
fixedly watching the movement of shadows
you need to turn around and welcome
brightness and colour and light.

Then there will be a different song.

Diana Neutze, 18 May 2009

Ready for a wedding...when?

2009-07-18T21:19:00.001-07:00

So, when's a good age to get married, then? Assuming we're agreed that the brain is immature until the mid 20s, any time before 25 is too young, right?

Not exactly. You might pick the wrong person in your teens, but before long, for all sorts of reasons, they become the right person -- at least for the first 20 years. I'm speaking for myself here.

That's me on the left in The Double Wedding painting above. Painted by my sister Lesley Evans, it (sort of) shows me and another sister, Deirdre, on the day of our double wedding. (Don't ask.) I was 19. Madly in love with my tall, dark and handsome fiance, and never doubting for a moment that we were a perfect couple.

Well, we weren't. We're so different that one of my sons is gobsmacked that we even chose to be friends, let alone got married. He's right: it's bizarre.

But Grant was tall dark and handsome and has always been a thoroughly kind, good and honest man. We shared many adventures and four amazing children. To say the marriage was a mistake would be outrageous, terrible -- because it had to happen, in order for our children to be our children.

So you could say I was far too young (though I sincerely believed I was frightfully grownup at the time) and I made a weird decision with my immature brain. And you'd be right. Yet in hindsight, I made a brilliant choice, despite the marriage ending inevitably in divorce.

When I look at younger people now, I'm glad I was blindly in love with the wrong man. I'm glad I married well before any possibility of making a mature choice. I'm glad I was a child bride. I'm glad I didn't try to find my true identity before bonding in passion. As it turned out, developing my true identity is taking an awful long time, so I'd probably still be a "spinster".

Instead, I am delighted that we married young. That way, we could divorce young, with decades to explore life independently. Thank goodness they didn't have MRI brain scans in our day.

Brain matures in mid-twenties? Tell it to the marines

2009-07-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

So, it's official. The human brain does not fully mature until the mid-twenties.

I thought we knew this already. Previous studies in 2004, 2006, February 2009... they all say the same thing. They're talking about physical maturity of the brain.

So teens are reckless drivers and a bad judge of almost everything. Fair enough. They're also exciting and excited and in chemical chaos. Most people I know are happy to have left the chaos behind... although are we secretly wistful about the power surge of feelings around first love?

I'm far from convinced that I was mentally mature at 25. Or 35. Or 45. Or 55. Or 65.

I always thought I'd gain Wisdom and Perspective. Some professors thought my early poetry, written in my 30s and 40s, lacked Maturity. I was bewildered at the time. What did maturity mean? Being terminally fair and deadly boring? Losing passion?

I know, it's probably tragic that I still don't feel mature. But I'm happy that way. Not smug. Still puzzled. Still wondering. But right onside with Denny Crane when he says,

It's fun being me. Is it fun being you?

Now there's a chap who never did mature.
BostonLegal.org

Mysterious footpath blotches

2009-07-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

Downstairs I have a second, small apartment which I rent short term, furnished. A recent tenant was a lovely old gentleman, Simon. Only old, not older, because he is younger than me.

He lives in Germany and some things here in Wellington mystified him.

"I've noticed blotches on the pavement," he told me in incredulous tones. "Some of them look a little bit like --- I don't know, could it be lichen? And some of them look like -- I don't know what. Could it possibly be... chewing gum?"

"Well now," I said. "It's most likely that some of them are lichen, and the others are chewing gum."

He was amazed. And I was amazed that he was amazed.

On the one hand, very likely in German cities the pavements are scraped and cleaned, so they don't have blotches. Blotches banned. Blotches deleted. Blotches despatched. Wellington underfoot may be disgusting to the foreign eye, for all I know.

On the other hand, how lovely that he could get so much fascination from a miniature quandary like this. He wasn't disgusted, he was charmed. So I was charmed. He could certainly summon up the daily smile.

Moreover, on the one foot, many old people walk heads down, staring at the pavement. That posture is one way you can spot an old person at 100 paces, even without your glasses. I suppose they've had a fall or fear a fall. It's tough when you walk like that, because you don't see the world or any of the wonderful things in it.

But on the other foot, if you walk around staring at the pavement, you may discover wonderful things there too. Like chewing gum and lichen. And by gum, down there, shimmering among the city blotches, one day you may spot an image of Elvis Presley or the Virgin Mary.

Then the boot will be on the other foot. And you'll be smiling.

Never too old to learn

2009-07-06T13:32:00.001-07:00

Well, here's what happened at the ukulele concert. The glorious International Wellington Ukulele Orchestra gave me and 99 other people a grand total of 4 x 1-hour lessons in playing the ukulele. My brother-in-law Ben said naughtily, "I didn't know anyone had to be taught to play the ukulele." He's just jealous. (OK, he did spend 40 years as a professional cellist.)

But I did wonder how I'd manage as a rank beginner aged 69. The mythology says that older people find it very hard to learn an instrument.

Certainly, I was slower than others by a long chalk. Dexterity and orientation were hard to find. Even hanging on to the instrument the right way was tricky.

Our final session was a "concert" in which our "bands" performed to friends and family. All week I struggled with my three chords. I was rehearsing with the wrong rhythm! When I was corrected just before the concert, rhythm and chord changes made more sense, but too late for me to do much more than smile and hit C on stage.

Since the concert I practise a bit during the TV ads, once or twice a week. And little by little it gets easier. You can teach an old dog new tricks: it just takes longer.

I smiled when I read Linley Boniface's column recently. She'd attended the same workshop. She said learning to play the ukulele has given her more pleasure than anything else for a very long time.

Me too. Joining the millions who play a musical instrument feels like joining the human race. Even the ukulele. Especially the jolly little ukulele.

Too old to get swine flu

2009-07-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

I'm too old to get swine flu (touch wood). So are you, if you're over 60. It seems that lots of us are immune (I keep wanting to add probably, hopefully, apparently, theoretically and touch wood) thanks to encounters with previous flu strains.

Isn't that great?

Last month I saw this guy in the street, an early adopter of the flu mask... masking his chin, so he could have a smoke. That made me smile.

Simple joys of writing

2009-07-06T12:55:00.000-07:00

Something to smile about every day, I said. And there is. Every day more than one blog post pops into my head... but not on to the screen. Busy busy busy I am, just like you.

And yet the pleasures of writing are many and various and immediate and long-lasting.

Instant thrill as you jot down some special insight or memory -- and the instant-ness is intense when blogging, because you write, publish and distribute all at once. No waiting, not even for the printer to spit it out. And any time thereafter you can change what you wrote, fix all the errors, smarten up the style.

You're never too old to write. But if you have spent your life saying, "I could write a book," stop thinking about a book. That's too daunting! Just start writing bits and pieces. (And by the way, bits and pieces can often be assembled into something that bears a remarkable resemblance to a book.)

Many of my friends (including two of my sisters) have started writing down stories about their lives, and it's such a buzz. Some are great writers, some aren't: who cares? The thrill lies in getting important memories into words. Doing it, as opposed to not doing it. Sharing stories. Saving stories. Gifting stories to the next generation or two.

It is generous, because you know, after we die, the kids will say, "I wish I'd recorded all those stories Granny (or Dad or Uncle Fred) used to tell."

That's not what I'm doing here but I strongly recommend it. Personally I've got a lot of other stuff to write, just at the moment. And it all gives me pleasure.

Yesterday, for instance, I was struggling with cover art: I'm converting a manuscript into an ebook. That's surprisingly complicated, but a wonderful challenge. The book is called Rude Stories for Mrs Palin. It makes me jump up and down with glee. More later!

Three score years and ten

2009-07-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

Meet Celia Taylor in her youth: my gorgeous mother. (Notice: I didn't say in her prime. That came later. As it does for us all.)

In this blurry photo she's probably 19 or 20, and it's around 1934. Glamorous even after climbing a mountain -- and obviously fit. Rebellious. She had a dark, sulky beauty when young, and men of all ages relished her company until she died. And she had six daughters of whom she was proud.

Celia was always adamant that three score years and ten was quite sufficient as a life span. She quoted the Bible in support.

"If I'm going gaga and I'm nothing but a burden," she told us occasionally, "Take me to a beautiful mountain, take me to a glacier, take me to the edge of a crevasse, then turn your back." Yeah, right. But she meant it! She was sufficiently realistic (or ethical) not to make us promise, which is just as well.

Fiercely independent, and passionate about the pleasures and powers of her life, Celia's worst fear was of being a burden. She positively wanted to die at 70, latest.

And so she did, on New Year's Day in her seventieth year. Some people can do that, I believe. Of course she had to work up to this death, by smoking (considered daring and glamorous when she was young) and getting a degenerative disease. You can't make a stroke happen out of the blue.

Well, that was strange even in those days. Today's 70 is yesterday's ... 50? Yet her mother and grandmother lived into their 80s, all guns roaring until quite near the end, I believe.

Regardless of logic, 70 was her deadline. Maybe I started this blog because next year I'll be 70 and I never felt less like dying.

Old, older,oldest

2009-06-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, 28 February, 2001, Japan's oldest twin Gin Kanie died, aged 108. She and her sister Kin (left) were national celebrities.

No doubt about it, she was chronologically old! She was also the oldest.

You can see the difficulty here. From Latin grammar books I learned that adjectives have three forms:
1. positive (e.g. heavy or sweet or old)
2. comparative (heavier, sweeter, older)
3. superlative (heaviest, sweetest,oldest)

Trouble is, the word old now has two meanings: chronologically old and old in spirit. Chronologically old has slunk out of use. We deny it, like fools, in favour of old in spirit.

It's funny, I can have an objective conversation about this semantic oddity with some of my friends but not others. Last Monday, for instance, a friend said, "You're not old. You're just older." It was clearly intended as a compliment, but since when was older younger than old?

It makes my head spin. Old is the new young? There's no such thing as old? Do we grow older, then old, and finally become the oldest — in our street, if nothing else?

Actually, it makes a kind of crazy sense when you consider the terms positively old, comparatively old and superlatively old. We don't progress in that order.

We start by being comparatively old, that is, a bit older than we were a few years ago, or yesterday. Then at some point, we can be classified as positively old. Finally, if we live to 108, that certainly qualifies as superlatively old.

But for most people, this will be the progression:
Positive: older
Comparative: old
Superlative: dead.

Being old is heaps better than being dead, surely. I think I'll join the Old Pride movement, if it exists.

Conference speakers over 55

2009-06-26T15:13:00.000-07:00

I'm still digesting 15 fascinating talks I heard at a conference last week, The Future of the Book. Audience was a mix of book publishers, teachers and lecturers, with a smattering of authors and technical people. So, not an ultra-young audience; definitely older than audiences at the usual conferences I attend, which lean towards the internet. Perhaps not a cross-section of book people, because they all had an interest in electronic books (or the possibly terminal illness of P-books).

I asked a few speakers how old they were: 55, 57, 57, they said. I made my own deductions about the others and got this distribution, counting only those whose presentations I saw and heard:

Young speakers (40 or younger): 8
Medium age speakers (40s and 50s): 6
Over 50 speakers: 9

My point? Plenty of people who are pushing 60 are leaders in the everyday world.

This world of exploding ebooks is a lively one, with exciting new developments every week. You have to keep on your toes to dodge the shrapnel and find a good trail through the smoke. For me, that's a deeply attractive feature. Nothing beats learning new stuff when it comes to keeping a live brain. (Apart from the luck of the genes.)

Oh yes, and they gave us this dessert of mini-pavlovas and fruit. Very nice.

You look young

2009-06-21T18:42:00.000-07:00

Since we are looking at hands, here's a naked one. If you're wondering how old someone is, look there.

I wrote this poem in exasperation when yet another person protested that I am not really old. How am I supposed to get used to being old when most people deny it?

But confusion is understandable, because...

Some people look old when they're young. Some people look young when they're old.

When old people were young, all old people looked old. But now, most people look young when they're what was once considered old.

Old has changed. Young has changed. Old is the new young.

But if you're not old when you're (nearly) 70, then who is old?

And if 70-year-olds are still young, then where are all the old ladies?

Old ladies are an endangered species. Somebody has to be them. We need volunteers. I volunteer.

You look young
“You look young.
For your age, that is.”
That’s cool?

Worship my wrinkles,
you fool.

The prodigal glove

2009-06-20T21:29:00.001-07:00

I'm wary of gloves. Why buy something that invariably escapes after you've worn it twice?

On the one hand, gloves are an excellent device and they perfectly fulfill the purpose for which you bought the darn things. They keep your hands warm, doh.

This glorious red glove is new. I've worn it (and its mate) three times. Icebreaker. Fine merino. Perfect.

Then I lost them, as you do. I'm so used to this that I barely blinked. Sure, I performed the ritual search of house, bags, pockets, drawers, filing cabinets, toybox, bathroom, shoes, refrigerator, photo album, sewing kit, oven, pot cupboard, litter box -- all the usual suspects. When the gloves failed to materialise, I barely blinked. Vanishing gloves? I'm over it.

But today I succumbed and searched one more time. And yay! Emanating from the depths of a bag I use only on Wednesdays, only for Crows Feet dance practice, was a bright red glow. Yessss. That's why I bought them red, not black.

Today's joy is the joy of finding lost gloves. They ran away from home, they had a spree and then they slunk back. It doesn't happen often in a century. Chalk it up.

Frost on the roof

2009-06-20T21:01:00.001-07:00

Last week we had a frost. In Wellington. It's a little unusual, and just up the coast (where it's warmer, as a rule) they had snow. The edge of the sea froze in the Pauatahanui Inlet.

I love frost for nostalgic and sensuous reasons.

Scenes scramble like penguins up through a hole in the ice. I remember as a child waking to a gorgeous layer of crystallized ice on the windows. (Imagine a home that chilly. The horror, the horror.) Walking to school through brittle white grass that crunched underfoot. Jumping on frozen puddles, of course. Paddocks steaming as the thin morning sunshine floated between macrocarpa trees.

Being cold is not very comfortable, I suppose. But it can be exciting. It's not a coincidence that people shiver with excitement or shiver with sexual thrill. One of my early love poems has a couple of lines:

Shiver, man, shiver.
You move like a river.

I photographed my frosty roof. I couldn't help imagining touching it with bare fingers... Would the frost freeze my fingers to the roof and peel off a layer of skin? Or would the finger melt the frost? But the photo didn't work. You can't see its cold fur. You won't shiver.

Joy of not-shopping

2009-06-15T22:26:00.000-07:00

Sunday I went shopping with my daughter Diana. I "needed" a smaller dining table, because I'm getting a new gas heater. Shape of room, location of heater etc. meant my table was now too large. So I thought.

We had a fine time, including lunch at the French Market, and eventually found just the table. One more shop, just for luck, and it all fell apart. An intelligent salesperson cocked her head when we rejected one table as too large. "Why do you say it's too large?" she asked. "If you have a long table, you don't have to seat anyone at the ends. So it may take up less space, including the people, than a small table."

Hm.

After all that earnest shopping, something dawned on me. My very large table was fine. It was the chairs that were the problem. They always seemed awkward, so we can't seat three a side comfortably. My posh chairs are always jangling and crashing against each other, spoiling sociable dinners. They colonise the carpet and attack the legs of other chairs.

Back home, I measured up. Sure enough, the chair legs splay out by 10 cm in two directions. I shoved two into the equivalent of a dark cupboard and promoted two little wooden folding chairs, relics of the 1940s Rigg Zschokke social hall. I love them. They are so cute. And they free up a lot of elbow room and leg room.

All this was fun, but the biggest thrill is that moment when I realise: No! I don't need to buy a new table! I spent nothing! I saved about $1500! The Not-Shopping-Aha-Moment is an exquisite chocolate rush.

That night I dreamed an Indian feast. Scores of people at an ashram, seated on the ground around bright cloths spread with yummy dishes. Goodwill and good cheer. Everyone wearing brilliant colours. No tables required.

The dream was a second reward for not-shopping. Perfect.

Fish make you smile

2009-06-14T00:02:00.001-07:00

Sunday is market day on the Wellington waterfront. That's where we shop for fresh veges, fruit, bread, eggs, lamb and fish.

We didn't always have this fish market but you can see why we love it. Today I got blue cod. Baked some veges, then turned off the oven and added fish in a dish. The flakes opened wide. I added green salad and a smudge of anchovy paste. My most heavenly mouthful was the last juicy bit of fish. My second most heavenly was roast mushroom with roast beetroot. Perfect.

My god, are we lucky or what?

Ukulele laughing

2009-06-13T23:46:00.000-07:00

The ukulele has got to be one of the funniest instruments ever. And I thought, if 5-year-olds can play them, surely I can too. Our very own Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra (whose awesomeness reaches the ends of the known universe) runs a beginners workshop each winter. They're like that: famous collectively and individually but still with buckets of energy to spend on humble Us. We get 4 lessons, and number 5 is a public performance. (True, that's more like a sherry glass than a bucket load, in terms of the 10,000 hours practice necessary to reach awesomeness. But they can't hold our hands forever.)

So, we divide into groups according to the song we want to play. Iko Iko and Buckets seem to have about 20 each. I choose Whaling, which we have never practised. And the group consists of 5 or 6... and I can't spot any other beginner beside myself.

Now either they cheated, and were quite cool ukulele players before the workshop. That happens a lot. You can't blame people for wanting to bask in the aura of the WIUO.

Or they are younger than me, with more dextrous brains and fingers. A likely tale. Yes really.

Or they practised more. So I've got to practise like mad all week. Then on the day, I might just hit C in time with the others, and finger-sync the other chords.

What's not to smile about? :-)

The cabbage flower

2009-06-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

Today's newspaper has 50 things you can do to have a nice life despite the recession. That sounds much too energetic for a lot of us old or nearly old ladies. We don't need to summon up the energy to do anything special, like play board games or volunteer at the zoo. We do plenty of stuff already, and we have lifetimes of experience in making ends meet. Make our own lunches? Puh-lease!

Oh no. I'd better not do any more stuff, because then I might stop just noticing stuff. Looking at stuff. Smiling at stuff. And I get a big kick out of that.

Yesterday, for instance, I noticed some newly planted flower beds. Or were they vegetable plots? These silly plants don't know whether to be a cabbage or a geranium.

In times like these, I am openly advising careers as cabbages. I'm sure they can find a vocation for this in their hearts.

Aspiring to a smile

2009-06-11T19:23:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about my next destination. My aspirations. I was about to start a blog specifically related to a book I've written, because in a few weeks it will be ready for sale as an ebook. (That'll be Rude Stories for Mrs Palin, when it happens.)

But hang on a minute, mate. What a bore, starting a new blog just to sell something! I know I should be marketing, but (like most writers -- like most small business owners in fact) there's always something I'd rather do. And when your heart's not in it, writing a blog or a book is a bore -- both for the writer and any unfortunate reader who stumbles upon it.

So I stopped. And thought for at least half an hour about this: what message would I rather explore? Every blog is, in a sense, a business blog. And every blog should have a central message. I know these things because I've just written an online course on that very topic.

Then it dawned on me that I do indeed have a "message" that I broadcast every day, almost every hour. It's not expressed in words, but in body language. It's not wise or deliberate or inspiring: it's involuntary.

I'm hopelessly addicted to the smile. I don't smile when my heart is breaking but a smile is my default facial expression. Time and again I don't even know I'm smiling until a complete stranger smiles back. For example, today I walked to town and back, and in one hour, four strangers hit me with big, broad, eye-contact smiles. That's a good score. What a buzz.

To get to the point. I concluded that my smile is my message, and my message is a smile.

I have no moral or philosophical reason for broadcasting my smile. I was just born with the happy gene.

On the other hand, there is heaps of scientific evidence about smiling, and I may explore some of that -- for instance, the physical act of smiling, no matter how artificial, tends to make you happier and even healthier. The beauty of this knowledge is that even people without the happy gene can practise smiling and reap the benefit.

Here come the Old Laughing Ladies

2009-06-10T17:30:00.000-07:00

Neil Young singing Old Laughing Lady could be the theme of this blog, as long as you don't actually think too hard about the lyrics. Instead let's celebrate all old laughing ladies, and remember the irresistible whining tones of Neil Young back in the days when there were no music videos. Or we missed them as we rushed around doing housework. Or something.