Advice to a 20-year-old

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

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!

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.

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?

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?