welsh hills again

A couple of years ago I wrote a number of posts on the year of being sixty two about the experience of getting older.  I was interested in the sense that our generation, in our sixties, is rather different from the women who have gone before us.  I don't remember my grandmother changing much from when I first remember her, when I think she was perhaps forty nine or fifty, to when she died at the age of seventy.  At fifty she was already a solid little barrel shape, encased in her corset which made her feel like a little hard barrel when she hugged me, which was often.  Her hair was already set in a tightly curled perm although I think at fifty she still had some of the red shade, which she handed onto my mother, which gently faded to white. My mother by contrast was immensely youthful looking so that the pictures of her at her sixtieth birthday show someone looking about fifteen years younger.  She always said that she would age very suddenly when she got to s...

Well somehow I didn't manage to post December's extract from the year of being sixty two, principally because I didn't write it!  Somehow the coming of Christmas, trying to keep up with my Spanish and the upheaval of house redecorating just squeezed my writing time into non existence.  I had been intending to spend a chapter looking at the upsides of ageing.  From the volume of stuff you read about "anti-ageing" you might suppose that there aren't any upsides, but that's not true.  My mother used to tell me in her forties, fifties and sixties that she would not want to go back, that she was genuinely happy to be where she was in her life.  She would I suspect have stopped the clock before my father began to be ill but even that would have taken them both well into their seventies.  I never totally understood why she was so content with the age she was when we had those conversations but I could see that it was true.   Knowing that has given me a sense,...

 I have only just managed to slip in November's selection from the Year of B eing Sixty Two before the end of the month.  Am I th e only person who thinks a lot about her hair? Hair colour defines us. Describe someone and it is one of the first things you will find yourself saying: the blonde woman, the dark haired man, the redhead.   Once you become grey haired you shift.    All the other hair colours say something about you, however stereotyped it may be.   Redheads are feisty and quick tempered.   Blondes are sexy and just possibly a bit dim.   Brunettes are sleek and glossy.   Grey haired people are just old.   So what do we do about the vexed question of hair? Perhaps how you think about this is affected by whether you have been colouring your hair when you   were younger.   I have had a lifetime of colouring mine.   I lived in New Zealand when I was a teenager where the sun ensured that my light brown h...

Here is the September extract from the longer pieces I am writing about the experience of getting older.  I am a bit self conscious about this one.  It feels a bit "showy offy" to talk about going to the gym somehow.  It is not about that.  It is about trying to engage more with what the body can do than with what it looks like.  Easier said than done.  I love to hear what you think so please tell me! Let’s face it, the aging body is not a pretty thing:   wrinkled knees and elbows, the saggy skin which hangs on your arms, turtle necks, veined legs.   But it is not just what the body looks like, it is also what it can do.  For the last few years of his life my father in law lived with us.   He made it to ninety five and was always remarkably, even relentlessly cheerful.   As a young man and right through middle age and beyond he had been strong.   He missed that strength when it disappeared on him as old age took ho...

So here is the first slice of the longer piece I want to write, in fact this is what I wrote on my second day at The Hurst on the Arvon course in that sudden rush of realisation of what I wanted to say.  I don't intend to blog the whole thing, even assuming I can write it, but I thought I would try to put an extract on every month and this is August's.  I hope that the discipline of committing myself to do that will keep me writing and I also hope that you will tell me what you think.  I love feedback although I think that too much might make me too self conscious so with luck this will be a balance that works for me.  I hope it works for you too. The year of being sixty two. Ageing isn’t linear.   It happens in sudden leaps and swoops.   One day you look in the mirror and your chin has gone.    Your chin which has been with you all your life has suddenly disappeared and in its place is a soft fleshy decline from your head to your nec...

It is a truism that women of a certain age become invisible.  You hear it again and again.  The phenomenon even spawned a response in the blogosphere where older women posted photographs of What I Wore Today, trying to reclaim the right of the older woman to be interested in clothes and style and what she looks like.  Occasionally I would stumble upon one of these posts, rarely perhaps and only because it was written by someone I read for other reasons, such as the thoughtful and erudite posts of Materfamilias.  Recently Mater posted about a certain disaffection with the idea  of these posts and it got me thinking about why I had never wished to join in. I like clothes.  I am interested in the way I look.  But I also find clothes deeply boring and am far more interested in what I do than in what I wear.  What is going on here in my head?  Do I think the older woman is truly invisible and if so do I care? When I was young I was reasonably ...