Frances Hodgkins, artist: portrait by Jan Bolwell

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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.