Old ladies dancing: what's difficult about that?

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

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

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

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. Girl friendships were viewed with paranoia. My best friend moved away, for unrelated reasons.

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 gladly, guiltily 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. 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 to her superior adult. 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.

I used to read Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, but this real life murder was no 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 deep down I still needed assurance that I was worthwhile even though I couldn't see what was going on under my nose at the time, and even though I walked away from a girl in need. Although Juliet and Pauline had left school when they committed murder, I still felt that I should have seen this tragedy brewing and prevented it somehow. I was not a good Samaritan: I passed by on the other side. In fact I ran a mile.

Now that's irrational, but guilt is often irrational.

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

Adjusting to widowhood

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

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

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.