A meditation on my own two feet
26 December 2024
I love my feet. They’ve stood by me for 72 years so far. Toes crossed that they’ll keep on keeping on for quite a while yet. My feet have kept me grounded when my head’s been in a spin, when I’ve fallen head over heels, when I’ve felt toey. Every day, they save me from falling flat on my face when I get out of bed. Do I tend to take them for granted? Yes, I have done so. But I’m trying to be more mindful these days of how blessed I am to have my own two feet still in good walking order.
If I calculate that my feet have taken a modest 5,000 steps a day on average since I turned 10, that’s 62 years x 365 x 5,000. That’s over 113 million steps. The actual total is probably much higher. My feet have run many thousands of miles, climbed many peaks, propelled me to many shores. They’ve steered me through amazing places on the planet, chased after inappropriate lovers, and stood me in good stead whenever I’ve had to beat a retreat. My toes have curled from ticklishness and embarrassment and pleasure.
My feet are no longer pretty, but to my eyes they are still gorgeous even if I can no longer reach them to paint the nails or to shave the hairs that spring forth on my toes seemingly overnight. Each one is different. Each has a story. Together, they have helped me to stand steady whenever life has threatened to topple me. Thank you, my dear feet, for keeping me grounded.
The day my teeth fell out in Bosnia
6 October 2024
At six on a Tuesday morning in Sarajevo, my upper left bridge of five crowns fell out and landed in the bathroom sink.
I’d become aware a few weeks earlier, while on a bus journey from Sofia, in Bulgaria, to northern Greece, that things weren’t as they should be with one of the crowns. It seemed to shift when I prodded it with my tongue.
“Something’s going on,” I emailed my usual dentist in Hungary, where I had an appointment booked for early the next month for follow-up root canal therapy.
“It won’t just be one crown,” she replied. “You have a bridge. They’re all connected on that side.”
Oh, shit.
During the week I spent in Thessaloniki, I walked as if on eggshells, brushed my teeth with the gentlest of motions and ate a lot of soup.
Then, a few days after I’d arrived in Bosnia’s capital for my fourth Sarajevo Film Festival, the whole plate simply fell from my gums one morning, as if it had been held in place by just a lick of spit.
Oh, fuck.
I was enrolled for a film masterclass that morning with rom-com darling Meg Ryan, as part of the film festival program of events, but my plans quickly changed. I needed to find a dentist who could see me toute de suite and re-afffix the plate temporarily.
“Dental emergency!!!! Help!!!!” I emailed calmly to the front desk downstairs at my regular hotel in Sarajevo.
Mirela confirmed at 09:10 that she’d wrangled me an appointment at a dental practice right across the street. Luckily, I had some face masks with me. I’d just spent a couple of months in Transylvania, and the similarity between Count Dracula’s bloody pegs and my own remnant posts might have scared any small children I encountered while crossing the road.
Three dentists worked on my mouth for an hour so that the original bridge could be shoved back up onto my gum and held insecurely in place by copious amounts of glue. It would see me through the next two weeks of watching European films on dark themes in darkened cinemas.
Back in Budapest, I had seven appointments in ten days to replace the posts that had broken off, and to fashion a new long-term temporary bridge until I can return to Budapest early in the new year for a permanent fix.
The sensation of losing a quarter of my teeth in one fell swoop one Tuesday in the Balkans may very well have been the sixth worst experience of my life. I was incredibly fortunate to be staying somewhere I was known and liked, so that people wanted to help me when I felt so vulnerable. I’m grateful that a dentist was available for a quick and affordable temporary fix within a few hours at a location that couldn’t have been more convenient. And while I missed out on meeting “Sally”, I was able to get my teeth back into the film festival and to enjoy another extended stay in wonderful Sarajevo.
Could my dream life turn to nightmare?
23 July 2024
I understand that my nomadic lifestyle wouldn’t suit, or even be of interest to, most women my age. My dream life might even be their worst nightmare. Being a single, self-employed editor without borders has suited me perfectly since I jettisoned my settled life in 2010; however, my 72nd birthday is just over the horizon. For the past year, I’ve felt I’m moving into a new phase of life, with new challenges. How to process these and not lose courage? I don’t want to be lying awake at night in unfamiliar beds, tossing and turning and sweating the small stuff.
Being nomadic has always posed logistical challenges. My close friends, old and new, are scattered far and wide. My dentist is in Hungary; my ophthalmologist and orthopaedist are in Borneo. My accountant is in Australia. My savings are in a fixed-deposit account in Malaysia. My most precious belongings are in my hometown in Australia. I have stuff stashed in friends’ homes in New York, Sarajevo, Sydney and Budapest. I now rent an apartment riverside in Kuching, Sarawak, for the books and textiles and kilim rugs and artefacts and other possessions that have attached themselves to me since 2022 despite my itchy feet, but I’m not a Malaysian resident or entitled by law to call that place home.
This is my peripatetic life when it’s going smoothly, which it hasn’t always done. There have been health, financial and emotional crises along the way, but up until now I’ve had the inner resources – the vitality and resilience – to withstand the buffeting and resume my course. Looking ahead into my senior years, though, I can expect that conditions will be rougher and I’m feeling vulnerable.
It seems I’m at the latest in a series of turning points.
My memoir, Skinful, is about how in our journey through life we inevitably reach points when we must examine where we have come from, where we are at and where we want to be. At these potentially life-changing times, we have the opportunity to make a new path to a different future.
My first such change of direction was when I left home in regional Australia at age 18 and moved to Sydney to study at university. I had determined on this course for my life and had set a goal during my last year of high school to win a scholarship that could set me on a path different from the one my family could provide.
The second time I changed direction was when I left my career in publishing in Sydney at age 34 and moved, on a seeming whim, to Hong Kong. There, I started to work freelance as an editor. Self-employment appealed to me because it offered, through the different types of published materials I worked on, a broader understanding of the community where I had made my new home. Nearly four decades later, I still prefer to work on a wide variety of materials.
Seven years after I moved to Asia, I returned to Australia. That turning point would set my course for the next 17 years.
The fourth turning point was in 2010, when I began to live in the world as a long-term traveller – or what was just starting to be called a digital nomad. I was 57, equipped to work remotely for my clients in Australia and Asia, and single. I also had a drinking problem that had been threatening for two decades to undermine everything I had worked so hard to achieve. One motivation in becoming nomadic was to force myself to face a fundamental fact: I could no longer use alcohol safely.
Just over a year later, I finally stood at that pivotal turning point. Did I have the courage to face, head-on and unmedicated, whatever life presented to me? Could I sit with feeling scratchy or anxious or fearful and not want to numb myself? I would have to find out the answer one day at a time.
It is now 13 years since I took the first step towards sobriety and began to make a path to a future that didn’t include alcohol.
COVID interrupted my travelling life for two years. I spent that interlude back in my hometown, reunited with my former life, my family and friends, and my possessions. It gave me the stability to finish writing my memoir and to fulfil a lifelong dream to have a book published, but it wasn’t a turning point.
When country borders started to reopen in 2022, the year I turned 70, I resumed my life as an editor without borders and, now, an author. I returned to spending months at a time in Kuching, New York, Budapest, Sarajevo and other places where I felt at home. Again, I was on familiar ground; it wasn’t a new phase of life.
The next turning point was a little longer in coming and its impact was unexpected.
My sixties had been the best years of my life. I was sober, mostly healthy and very fit. By the time a fall put an end to my running career at 68, I had run 5 marathons and 48 half-marathons. I had trekked and walked in some of the world’s wild places. My work as a freelance editor provided a steady income, and I had sent my own book out into the world. I was spending time in fascinating places. I enjoyed the freedom and independence that came with being single and rarely felt lonely. I had developed a passion for taking photographs.
When I turned 71, it felt like the start of a countdown in a way that 70 hadn’t. The ticking of the clock had now become more audible. I had never intended to spend the whole of my life alone. In my sixties, I still felt young. While I’d explored some relationship possibilities, I hadn’t felt that time was running out; I just wanted to experience intimacy with someone companionable. Had I left it too late to find a loving partner?
The universe stepped in and offered me what I thought I had wanted. It seemed it wasn’t too late – if I wanted to change my whole life.
For five months I pondered this question: Did I want a different life from the one I had created for myself?
It became clear to me thatthe glue that might hold together, through their seventies and beyond, two people who had known each other for half a century only as friends was too weak. It wasn’t enough to want to want what was available; the wanting needed to come from my toes. It wouldn’t have been fair to either of us otherwise.
There would, it seems, be no irresistible next life provided on a platter by a sentimental, romantic universe.
Which has positioned me as a single woman for probably the remainder of my life.
How do I feel about that? And is the lifestyle I’ve become most comfortable with sustainable?
This is possibly the last chance I will have to shape my future. The paths I’ve made for myself up to now have created a life I couldn’t even have imagined at 18. I have dreamed big for a small-town grrrl. I don’t even regret the years of struggling with my personal demons before I understood that I needed to change myself and not just my situation, and that I could do that. I do regret having harmed or hurt people along the way. My chickens have inevitably come home to roost and I am now the person I created from the raw material of my childhood. My life is the fruit of my own doing. The responsibility rests solely with me.
All too often, I forget that the world I live in exists only in the space between my ears. It is only as I perceive it. I cannot change the world. I cannot change another person. I cannot prevent life happening to me. My only power lies in how I process stuff. It’s amazing how differently I experience things around me if I venture out in a bad mood and process everything I encounter through that mindset. I’m always going to encounter stupid or annoying or vacuous people, squealing children, feral e-scooter riders, baristas who refuse to heat milk to a temperature beyond lukewarm … There are potential irritants everywhere. On any day when I venture out into the world in a negative frame of mind – whether it’s because I feel vulnerable or anxious or fearful or misunderstood or lonely – the chances are much higher that I will overreact to a situation and make it worse.
By contrast, when my mindset is positive, I’m better able to counter frustrations with humour or acceptance, or simply to remove myself from a situation that isn’t to my liking without having a meltdown about it.
So, how am I going to process the probability that the coming years will be more challenging on many fronts than anything I’ve experienced to date, purely because I’m getting older and am still on my own? How can I equip myself to explore what is likely to be the final phase of my life with interest, humour and grace?
Stay tuned.
A Golden Grrrl’s Guide to the Galaxy
7 July 2024
Quite a lot has happened in the 14 years since I ventured out into the world as a self-employed, not-very-solvent and not-yet-sober singleton at age 57. I’d been living back in my hometown in Australia for the previous 17 years while I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I tell much of that story in my previous blog, My Own Two Feet: The Running, Trekking, Walking, and Other Adventures of Robyn from Oz (2009–2019) (http://myowntwofeet-robyn.blogspot.com), and in Skinful: A Memoir of Addiction (2024). I’ve been sharing the day-to-day ups, downs and roundabouts of my peripatetic life on my Facebook page since 2007.
My life as a global nomad and an editor without borders had been interrupted in early 2020 by a romantic fantasy involving a man from my past. (For readers of Skinful: no, not ‘Tom’ – though I did put myself back in the ring with him again later for a brief period.) I shipped to Australia the contents of the apartment I had rented as a base in Budapest, Hungary, thinking my destiny lay in my home country. (The impending COVID pandemic meant I needed to take a leap of faith.) Just hours after I entered West Australian airspace, Australia’s borders clanged shut.
When this new fantasy quickly turned to dust, as mine are wont to do, I moved back to my hometown on the other side of the country. I’d come full circle after a decade away. It hadn’t been my intention to return to live there, but COVID border restrictions were in place everywhere. A series of decisions that had seemed right at the time positioned me somewhere I hadn’t planned to be, but there were worse places to spend the pandemic.
There was a lot to enjoy in my new–old life in Oz. I reclaimed all my possessions and created a home. I was able to farewell my younger brother Geoff when he died suddenly. (My parents had died within a few months of each other in 2020.) I worked hard to get my book into publishable shape and found the support I needed to send it out into the world, even if I couldn’t go there myself. I spent happy times with old and new friends. I continued to work remotely for my clients, ran and walked, travelled in-country, and took photographs. Photography is, for me, a way of finding something of beauty or interest in everyday scenes.
Still, I couldn’t imagine that this was my forever life. I’d soon be turning 70 and about to enter my golden years, but I wasn’t yet ready to settle down. There were places I wanted to be, friends I wanted to see. I wanted to experience again a bigger world than the one on my doorstep – a world I had learnt I could live in comfortably, happily, gratefully. By late 2021, I was at another turning point.
After recovering from two physical issues that incapacitated me for a few months – a broken elbow sustained from a fall during what ended up being my last run, and lower back pain from a compressed nerve – I decided to reclaim my life as a full-time traveller as soon as the pandemic would allow. I could still earn an income working remotely as an editor, and I could still manage the physical challenges of being nomadic. But there was no time to waste.
I put my possessions back in storage, found a travel insurer that would cover me for 12 months, researched the COVID requirements for travelling overseas, and moved to Sydney in early 2022 to await the reopening of Malaysia’s border.
In the next few blog posts, I’ll quickly revisit my travels since April 2022, when I arrived back in Sarawak (one of two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo) ready to resume my adventures. Two years into my second life as a global nomad, I’m writing this in a café on the ancient main square in Sibiu, Transylvania. I’ll turn 72 in a few months and my lustre is tarnishing. I no longer run, but I walk 10,000 or more steps on most days. Occasionally, I think: “WTF am I doing?” But mostly I see life through a positive lens. As a single, sober (since 2011), self-employed (but still not very solvent) 70-something, I’m grateful to be me and to be spending my golden years gallivanting around the galaxy.
Six go bonkers in Borneo
15 October 2022
I had stamps from Sarawak in my collection when I was a child growing up in Albury, in regional Australia. In my imagination, there were few places more exotic than this Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. It evoked images of indigenous head-hunting tribes in brilliantly ornate costumes, colonial-era white rajah rulers, and jungles teeming with orangutans and carnivorous pitcher plants.
It had been my first main destination back in 2010 after I’d sold my house, rehomed my two dogs and set off from Australia with a suitcase and a laptop bag intending to wander the world indefinitely as a freelance editor. I showed up again, with my passport and vaccination certificates, four days after Malaysia’s border reopened to visitors on April 1 of this year.
I’d made many other visits to Kuching, Sarawak’s capital, during the intervening decade. I had a life there: friends, routines, a favourite place to stay. I was well known at a local hospital, where my visits often included a health check-up. One year, I’d even flown halfway around the world to have a plate inserted in my broken dominant arm after a collision with a bicycle in Morocco. I had suffered heat exhaustion in a running race one time and been hospitalised and placed on a drip. I had memories of helping to organise Friday film nights at the Batik Boutique Hotel, of singing karaoke in a ramshackle riverside cafe with the woman who cleaned my hotel room. I had even apparently acquired two “husbands”, one Malaysian Chinese, the other Malay, a story I tell in my book.
I knew Kuching well, but there was much of the state I still hadn’t seen. So, in early May when I was invited along on a five-day road trip from the coast to primary rainforest in the highlands with five wacky Sarawakian friends who were all passionate about the local cuisines, culture and countryside, I jumped at the chance.
I’d known Jackie and Joanna for years. We’d once trekked through a leech-infested swamp in search of a lost antimony mine with Jay, a retired Canadian forestry expert. The experience of finding just the tail end of what I assumed was a leech when I reached deep into the front of my walking trousers to investigate a troubling sensation has possibly scarred me for life. It undoubtedly scarred the young doctor in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, who examined my nether regions some months later after I’d continued to be bothered by the niggling thought that a leech may have made its home there.
My five Sarawakian friends were all bonkers about food. In fact, I suspected our entire itinerary had been designed around maximising our opportunities to try jellyfish fresh from the sea, ferns gathered that day in the jungle, pineapple grown in the garden of our treehouse-like guesthouse. “Where are we having lunch?” Jo asked at breakfast one morning while still only halfway through her bowl of kolo mee noodles, a local specialty.
We had changed our plans the previous evening and squeezed into two rooms in a two-star hotel in Serian after we found no record of our booking at a homestay in a village in an area of high limestone hills filed with caves. “No worries,” the host said. “You can sleep in the longhouse.”
Longhouses are the traditional communal homes among Sarawak’s indigenous people, or Dayaks. There was a fine example of a longhouse in the village, but it wasn’t the one we were offered. Our six intrepid adventurers weren’t keen on sleeping side-by-side on a ramshackle verandah that was also home to mosquitoes, rats and cockroaches, as well as some local ruffians.
We travelled by narrow longboat powered by outboard motor across a lake formed when a river had been dammed to generate hydroelectricity. The building of dams and the destruction of virgin rainforest in Sarawak are controversial topics, not least because of the destruction of the natural habitat of the tribal peoples who have survived off the land and rivers for thousands of years.
We stayed some miles upriver from the lake at a newly constructed lodge in a traditional village. The place was aimed at high-end travellers, but it didn’t provide the sorts of basic amenities we assumed would come with its high prices – towels, toilet paper, working toilets, lights. I went a little bonkers myself and thought I should tell the manager how to run his business, which always goes over well …
“Hopefully, [when you travel] you leave something good behind,” wrote the chef and food writer Anthony Bourdain. I don’t think he meant the three large handwoven baskets I bought during our road trip into the heart of Sarawak, which I will reclaim from my friend Emily and use and enjoy whenever I next spend time there. Rather, I think he meant the positive impact we can have as travellers by engaging with local people in a place we choose to call home for however long or short a time.
The skin I’m in
6 May 2022
“Two kilos more than last time, madam,” said the nurse who was checking my vital signs.
“Last time” was four years ago, around the lunar new year in 2018. I’d had a basal cell carcinoma gouged out of my nose at this specialist hospital in Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak which shares the island of Borneo with Brunei and Indonesian Kalimantan.
I’ve been here so many times, the doorman, Roy, recognises me. And until the Grab ride-share app decimated their business, Kuching’s taxi drivers would just assume it was my destination whenever I approached the shelter near the riverfront where they congregated and waited for trade: “Hospital, miss?”
This time, I’m having a skin check. In late 2010, on my second visit to Kuching, I’d had my head examined after I slipped while walking in a stream and crashed face-first onto a boulder, nearly shattering my jaw. The bruise on my chin and neck was impressive, but my bones held up – that time.
When I fractured my right humerus in Morocco in 2014 after colliding with a bicycle, I flew halfway around the world for a second operation here in Kuching, where the Chinese orthopaedic surgeon inserted a large plate that would better help the broken halves knit. By then, this hospital in a part of the world that was better known for its orang-utans, “white rajahs” and once-proud headhunting indigenous tribes was my medical facility of choice as an ageing international nomad with brittle bones.
“You have osteoporosis in your spine and osteopenia in your left hip,” said the Malay doctor who had reviewed the results of a health screening my travel insurer paid for in 2012. With her freckled face framed by a hijab, she looked about twelve. “No falling!”
In 2016, after another comprehensive check-up, she’d expressed concern about my potassium levels. “Bad for the heart. Don’t eat too many bananas.” Damn … a favourite breakfast when in Malaysia was roti pisang.
Now, in April 2022, I hadn’t had a fall since early 2021 when I shattered my right elbow after tripping during a run, and I couldn’t recall the last banana I’d eaten. But I’d just spent COVID in Oz, whose supermarkets I consider the best in the world. I was exercising less after I’d accepted that running had become too hazardous. And for two months late last year I’d had difficulty even walking due to a pinched nerve in my lower back. Two kilos had seemingly now attached themselves permanently to my slight frame. And the skin check that was the purpose of my latest visit – that scaly patch on my face I’d been concerned about? “It’s just age,” said the Indian dermatologist.
I’ve known Emily, a Chinese Sarawakian, since my first visit to Kuching in early 2010. That time, I’d been hauled off to hospital in an ambulance after I’d passed out from heat exhaustion during an afternoon running race. I’d come out of some sort of fugue state, panting and vomiting, far off course near the main mosque and on the wrong side of some busy roads. I had bumps and scrapes I couldn’t account for. A man was fanning me with a torn piece of cardboard. My skin was grimy with dried sweat and smelled of vomit and fear. I talked someone into driving me to the race finish line, from where I went to hospital and was attached to a drip until I was sufficiently rehydrated for Emily, who had stayed by my side, to drive me back to my hotel.
At her laundry business last week, which is near my current hotel, Emily placed a clip on my left index finger and entered my age (69) into the attached device.
“Wah!” she said. “Minus 16!”
“What does that mean?”
“It means your heart is good!”
According to this test, my vascular age is 16 years younger than my actual age. My bones may now be brittle and breakable, my skin may be becoming dry and scaly, and there may be two kilos more of it around my middle than I might wish, but it seems I have a good heart. And as I venture back out into the world, I’m reminded of the love I have in my heart for the people and places who make the world feel like home and my skin a good place to be in.
This post first appeared on 6 May 2022 as ‘This One Life: The skin I’m in’, in www.startsat60.com, the website for digital-savvy baby boomers.
Grabbing the Year of the Tiger by the tail
6 April 2022
I first left Australia as a global nomad just after the lunar new year of 2010. It was a Year of the Tiger. Twelve years on, a full cycle of the Chinese zodiac later, I’m resuming my international wanderings after having been grounded in Australia for two years by COVID.
In the pantheon of animals represented in the zodiac, the tiger is a positive sign evoking strength, courage, bravery and resilience. I’ll need those tiger-like qualities as I embrace a new turning point and head into the next phase of my life.
A lot has changed in the last dozen years.
I was nearly 58 when I first became a nomad; this time, I’m staring 70 in the jowls.
Back then, I still ran marathons and half marathons. Today, I’m a walker, mindful of the fragility of my osteoporotic bones after breaking my dominant arm for the second time when I fell during a run in early 2021.
In the last Year of the Tiger, I was without a home and hadn’t yet met people who have since become my global family. At the start of my next spin around the zodiac, I feel at home in the world, with loving and supportive friends in Borneo, Budapest, Bombay and beyond.
In 2010, social media wasn’t the thing it has since become. I was on Facebook, but my posts were infrequent. By the time I returned to Australia after a decade of wandering around the world, the platform had become a visual diary that I updated daily. Now, in 2022, in addition to my personal Facebook page, I have a presence for my editing business and my book, and I administer four special-interest pages. I also have Twitter and Instagram accounts, two websites, two blogs, and a LinkedIn profile. It’s probably all just attention-seeking behaviour.
One of my hopes in the last Year of the Tiger was to find the courage to stop drinking. I had been struggling for two decades with “grey area” drinking and had finally accepted that I would never again be able to drink like a “normal” person. As a senior world traveller who was dependent on the income I earned as a freelance editor, I needed to keep my wits about me if I was to be safe, stay employable, and enjoy the unique lifestyle I had imagined for myself. It still took me 15 months to jettison the misguided notion that I could be the boss of white wine, rather than it be the boss of me, but I’ve not had any alcohol since 28 August 2011. As I hit the road again in the COVID era, I no longer need worry about what might happen should I have too much to drink.
At this latest turning point in my life, I’m at last a published author with a book to promote wherever my travels take me over the next year or two. Skinful: A Memoir of Addiction is a rollicking account of the turning points in my life over the past three decades, and of how it is never too late to make a new path to a different future.
What hasn’t changed in the last dozen years?
I was single in 2010 and I’m still single in 2022. But I haven’t stopped imagining that I might meet someone who is a good fit with me. I’m heading back into the world with an open mind and an open heart.
Living an alcohol-free life doesn’t necessarily mean I am sober. I’m still impatient and can be intolerant when triggered. Being truly comfortable in my own skin requires that I continue to work on changing myself and not just my location. Wherever I go, there I’ll be. If I want to be a fun and resourceful travel companion for myself, I need to stop pussyfooting around, grab the Tiger year by its tail and manifest in myself the qualities it represents.
As part of this process of continuing to look at how I contribute to creating my own experience of life – its difficulties and hardships as well as its joys and successes – I’ve begun talking with a counsellor. From wherever I’ll be in the world, I will work with her to try to gain a better understanding of what triggers my insecurities, anxieties and grievances and to learn more productive strategies for coping with those emotions.
In the Chinese zodiac, this year is a propitious one for making big changes, both in one’s world and in oneself. I need only to be surefooted, brave and courageous, like the tiger, as I set off on the next stage of my journey.
This post first appeared on 6 April 2022 as ‘This One Life: Grabbing the Year of the Tiger by the tail’, in www.startsat60.com, the website for digital-savvy baby boomers.
50 shades of grey hair
20 March 2022
While I straddle another turning point in my life, I’m renting a serviced apartment in Sydney’s Potts Point. I’m at what is now my regular morning café, where the baristas know my coffee order and my name. I used to hang out here four decades ago with journalists, characters from both sides of the law, musicians, landscape gardeners and drag queens. Nowadays, the musos and queens are aged in their seventies and the younger customers are gym junkies and dog walkers. I’ve been trying to find my way into writing about seniors and sex for an online publication. Finally, I settle on a framework for the piece and order another coffee.
“Same again, please, Angel.”
With a fresh cup in front of me, I open my laptop.
Cleo, 69, might pass for 62 if one’s eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Her trim figure and shoulder-length hair divert attention from the lines on her face and her sagging jaw line. Her eyelashes have all but disappeared, though her eyebrows have grown bushier in recent years, with coarse, long white hairs that sometimes appear overnight. Her skin holds the dent for longer now when pressed. There are creases around her eyes, though they hint that life has taught her to laugh more at herself than at others.
“Are you in the line, doll?”
A man, seventyish, gestures at the half-dozen people ahead of Cleo in the supermarket queue. In her basket are the makings of a dinner for one: salad ingredients, marinated goat cheese, a rotisserie chicken. She sees a pleasant, craggy face, a thatch of white hair, a man whose weathered skin sits compactly on his rangy frame.
“Yes, I am. And don’t call me ‘doll’.”
“Okay, darlin’,” he says, and winks.
He stands behind her. She can feel his eyes on her, smell a masculine scent that reminds her of Ted.
The queue is slow moving. She closes her eyes and lets her thoughts drift.
She and Ted had met when they sat together during a bus ride into the city. The attraction had been immediate and mutual. She had liked how he smelled, the sound of his voice. They’d exchanged phone numbers and met the next day for lunch. Two days later, they watched a foreign film on Oxford Street, then sat in a quiet bar until late, talking and touching, flirting, laughing. There was comfort – a sense of familiarity, a hint of something beyond.
The following week, they had eaten dinner in a new Thai place on Macleay Street. They had spoken of the strong physical attraction between them and it seemed they would spend the night together. She had dressed as he had requested: a simple and stylish outfit – she had combined pieces picked up from visits to Berlin, Budapest and the English spa town of Bath – worn over lace lingerie.
“Would you wear suspenders and sheer black stockings for me?” he’d asked her. “While we are in the restaurant, I want to imagine how your legs look under your clothes.”
His asking this of her, and her willingness to do it, had excited them both.
She’d bought the bra and wide-leg black silk knickers in a boutique in the red-light district of Amsterdam.
“I haven’t felt this sexy in years,” she told him.
“Just thinking about what you’re wearing makes me feel young.” He had stroked the back of her neck after the server removed their tom yum soup bowls. “Describe them to me again …”
After dinner, they had walked down to Rushcutters Bay Park, to the water’s edge, where pleasure boats were bathed in moonlight. She had raised her skirt and placed his hand on her leg, where her stocking top met her skin.
Ted had been a tender lover, but he confessed that he could not be hers. There was someone else, somewhere else; someone he couldn’t love physically, but to whom he was committed.
Cleo had broken it off with him soon after.
She feels a light touch on her arm.
“It’s your turn now, darlin’.”
It’s the man who had stood in line behind her; the man whose pheromones had sent her into an erotic reverie.
“Are you right, there, dear?”
The twenty-something checkout operator sounds impatient.
“Yes. I’ve never been better. And don’t call me ‘dear’.”
The man laughs.
“I’m Max.”
She laughs too – at herself, at her quickness to bristle.
“I’m Cleo.”
“Shall we have a coffee together, Cleo?” he says.
“Yes, Max. I would like that.”
It’s a relief to have written a first draft of my piece. I finish my coffee and check my phone. There is a message from a 60-something guy I met on a dating app earlier this week. I couldn’t figure out how to use the site and cancelled my subscription after just one day. Apparently, I’d sent encouraging signals to half a dozen men without intending to. One of them looks okay, though, and we’ve spoken on the phone.
“Shall we have a coffee together?” he texts.
“Yes. I would like that,” I reply.
This post first appeared on 20 March 2022 as ‘This One Life: 50 shades of grey hair’, in www.startsat60.com, the website for digital-savvy baby boomers.
Still single @ 69. Have I left it too late to find a loving partner?
11 March 2022
“You’ll find your soulmate late in life,” said the psychic who was examining my palm. I was in my mid-twenties. The skin of my hand was unblemished and supple, the lines on my palm a possible roadmap for my future and not yet a record of my past.
It wasn’t looking likely that I’d be partnering up any time soon – I had two broken engagements and four stints as a bridesmaid behind me. But how late was “late”?
I had no urge to have children, but I liked the idea that there was someone who would be a good fit with me. A man I’d set my sights on as soon as we’d met back in the late 1970s was proving to be elusive. In the mid-1980s I moved to Hong Kong, and he moved to England.
A year into my forties, I returned from Asia to Australia with anxiety caused by a drinking problem. I’d become reliant on a nightly bottle of white wine to cope with the stresses and strains of life as a self-employed freelance editor on a small island off the coast of China. Uncomfortable in my own skin, I had little prospect of being a good fit with anyone else.
The men I was meeting in my middle years were either committed to someone else, or just wanted something on the side, or were as screwed up as I was. A bloke I met online through a mutual-interest network invited me on a driving holiday in New Zealand. When I arrived at the hotel we’d agreed to share for two nights before heading into the hills, he was already naked. Two days later, I jettisoned him and any thought that he might be “the one”.
By my fifties, some of the men I’d known decades before were back in the dating game, often encumbered now with hurts, grievances, and complicated arrangements for seeing children or even grandchildren. And I still wasn’t facing up to my own issues.
“Do you have a problem with alcohol?” said an artist I’d met and wanted to be with.
I trusted him to lead me when we danced; and to keep me safe when I perched on his bicycle crossbar, his arms around me, and he freewheeled down the slope near my house. But I didn’t trust him to love me if he really knew me.
“No!” I’d said, shocked by the thought my secret was exposed.
“You change when you have a drink,” he said. “It’s like you’ve kept yourself on hold until then. If you do have a problem, I’m not interested.”
Instead of taking his rejection as a prompt to do something about my relationship with alcohol – with myself – I drank to cover my embarrassment and my anger at being spurned.
With my sixties looming, I set off from Australia again to travel the world as a digital nomad. I could work from anywhere as a freelance editor. I had taken up trekking and long-distance running in recent years and had found I had some ability as a veteran athlete. The training for marathons helped me to moderate my drinking enough that no one knew how much time I spent thinking about alcohol. I had vowed that I would use this next part of my life to finally get sober.
I had my last drink during a hurricane in New York City on 28 August 2011, two months before my 59th birthday. I sought support from others in recovery who knew how alone I felt. I changed my routines. I took things one day at a time. And I trusted that I had chosen the better path to a different future.
The psychic who had examined my palm all those years before had been right: I did find, late in life, the love and acceptance I had been seeking since I was a young adult. But I had been waiting to find it from someone else, not understanding that I needed first to love and accept myself; to be my own soulmate.
Now free of an addiction that prevented me from trusting that I am worthy of being loved, I am open to sharing my life with an intimate partner as I enter in my seventies. “Define ‘late’”, I might have asked the universe at any time from my twenties to my sixties as I waited for someone to come along and save me. Now that I am in a loving and respectful relationship with myself and feel comfortable with letting the person I am on the inside show on the outside, I finally feel able to create space in my life for someone else to enter and be an intimate companion for the time that remains.
In New York one day in 2019, at my favourite Japanese restaurant near Central Park, I was seated next to a couple whose conversation about food preferences and allergies indicated they were on a first or second date.
“You look adorable,” I heard him say. “My heart is going pitter-patter.”
I snuck a glance at them. He had reached a gnarled hand across the table and was stroking her veiny one.
They looked to be in their eighties.
“You’re weaker when you’re older,” he said. “You succumb more quickly.”
It may be late, but it’s never too late.
This post first appeared on 11 March 2022 as ‘This One Life: Still single at 69…’, in www.startsat60.com, the website for digital-savvy baby boomers.
Making a new path to a different future
February 2022
Global nomadism was becoming a thing when I sold up and left Australia in 2010 with a one-way air ticket. My fellow digital workers in coffee bars and cafes all over the world were mostly millennials, though, not greying baby boomers. At 58, I wasn’t a cashed-up retiree or widow, or one half of a couple of bucket-listers. I was a barely solvent, single, self-employed book editor who loved to travel. On a seven-week stay in Europe in 2007, I’d realised it could be a lifestyle.
During that trip, on a fourteen-day trek around Mont Blanc, our group of hikers had stopped for lunch at a hotel that had once been grand but was now decayed. I visited the old-style squat toilet. Around my ankles was one of the two dozen pairs of paper underpants I had brought along to cut down on laundry. Every time I pulled them down or up, they would stretch, becoming so voluminous by the end of the day that it was difficult to stuff them back into my walking trousers.
In the stall, while trying to extract some tissues from my pocket to use as toilet paper, I overbalanced and fell forward. It seems I hadn’t latched the door properly and it gave way under my weight. I pitched forward into the main restroom area, my big-girl pants still around my ankles, my bum bare.
“Thank you, thank you!” I said to the universe when I found the bathroom empty. I waddled backwards into the stall and firmly latched the door.
Later in the day, in a village market, I spotted a stall selling lace knickers. I bought a dozen pairs, including one in bright orange, and threw away what remained of my stash of disposables. At our group’s farewell dinner later in the week, I would be named “Best Knicker Shopper at High Altitude”.
When I left Australia a few years later and became a full-time nomad, in my suitcase were those knickers (for luck), clothes and footwear suitable for different climates and activities, and a well-used corkscrew. On my back was a monkey I’d been trying unsuccessfully to shake for twenty years: a drinking habit that was affecting my physical, emotional and mental health. I was an under-the-radar, high-functioning, grey area drinker who was using white wine to numb old hurts.
If I threw myself out into the world without a safety net, I figured I’d be forced to be my best self. Nothing else had helped me to overcome my drinking problem: not marathon running, not slogging through mud along the Kokoda Track, not trekking in the high Himalaya.
The voice in my head that had been asking for two decades whether my drinking was normal, whether I drank like a “normal” person, was now too loud to fob off with false promises of I’ll sort myself out when I’m feeling stronger. I had reached a turning point. There was no longer any joy in my drinking. I drank mostly alone – without witnesses – rather than in company. Drinking was now causing me more anxiety than I was using it to medicate.
What sort of future lay ahead if I continued along my current path? It was time to make a new path to a different future.
During a return visit to New York in August 2011, a massive hurricane bore down on the city. I took it as confirmation that the time had come for me to surrender. I stocked up on all the necessities for weathering the storm over the weekend – food, batteries, bottled water, candles – and three bottles of a Chilean white wine. I would have exactly the amount I wanted to drink over the two nights of the lockdown. It would require restraint: if I drank more than half of the second bottle on the first night, I wouldn’t have the six glasses I needed for the second night and would have to reschedule the whole rigmarole.
I didn’t plan to obliterate myself. I was frightened enough without having to scare myself further. If I could drink exactly the amount that I needed to achieve conscious numbness, I could say goodbye to my increasingly unreliable companion of many years with some dignity before starting my sober life.
It was the end. Ahead lay a different future, one that didn’t include alcohol. What might it look like and feel like? I had no idea, but I would make my way towards it one sober day at a time.
I had gone as low in my own estimation as I was prepared to go. My life hadn’t ended in the gutter, though I’d sometimes fallen in one. I hadn’t lost a driver’s licence for drink driving, or a husband and children through alcoholic neglect. I didn’t need a stint in detox or rehab. I still functioned well in areas that were important to me. But every drink came at a cost. It eroded my dignity and self-respect. It caused me to lie; to feel shame and guilt, anxiety and fear; to withhold my real self from people I loved and wanted to be loved by.
Enough, already, said my inner New Yorker. It was time to accept that, from here on, I wouldn’t be able to live an authentic life, comfortable in my orange knickers-clad skin, if alcohol were a part of it. There could be no more moving the day of reckoning to the first day of next year, or of next month, or of next week. Tomorrow was of no use to me. I had only today.
Like a diver on the ocean floor who could see, far above, the shimmer of sunlight with its promise of air, I would have to ascend from the depths slowly and patiently if I were to decompress safely.
This post first appeared in February 2022 as ‘This One Life: Making a new path to a different future’, in www.startsat60.com, the website for digital-savvy baby boomers.
Celebrate the small things
January 2022
My 60th birthday celebration looked nothing like my 50th. At 50, I’d needed all the big guns: a themed party with everyone I knew who lived within cooee of Albury-Wodonga, the hometown in Australia I’d returned to on my knees seven years before; a Supremes-lookalike tribute band from Melbourne; a bouffant wig and a slinky black outfit. I’d recently quit smoking, but alcohol was still a daily necessity. Had anyone looked closely enough, they might have seen the fear in my eyes.
Ten years later, in 2012, I celebrated becoming a 60-something with three friends in a diner on New York’s Upper West Side. The sun hadn’t long risen over Central Park, where we had run a 10-kilometre circuit while most people in the city still slept. My birthday outfit was black leggings, well-worn ASICS running shoes, my 2010 New York City Marathon race T-shirt, now sweaty in the armpits, and a tiara. I was fit, feeling fabulous and was finally free of an addiction to alcohol that I’d struggled for two decades to manage.
Sixty? Bring it on!
Later that month, as New Yorkers were deciding on their costumes for Halloween, I packed my suitcase and flew to Ireland where I was entered in a 25-kilometre race. The only competitor in my age group, I automatically scored a first place. My prize was a basket of cosmetics for ageing skin.
I had been a single, self-employed global nomad for just over two years. For the past 14 months, I had also been learning how to live comfortably in my skin as a sober woman. What experiences and challenges would life put in my path? Would I face them with dignity, self-respect and courage?
When I was 58 and still drinking, I’d found myself in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, known for head-hunters, orang-utans and white rajahs. A new friend, Jackie, introduced me to Josephine, a beauty therapist. I was planning a reunion in the nether regions of Queensland with a man I’d known since we were in our twenties. When Tom and I had first met, my skin was young and didn’t yet hold the dent when pressed. My nipples had been perkier, and my gums hadn’t started to recede. Josephine looked me over. “Your breasts could be plumped up a bit. I’ve got just the thing.”
Jo’s home salon resembled a medium-sized intensive care unit but smelled of lotions and potions. She hooked me up to a kind of breast pump. The regular, gentle chugging reminded me of my Uncle Frank’s dairy farm, in regional Victoria, which I had visited regularly as a child. I would hover at the edge of the milking shed, careful not to step in fresh cow manure, and watch Frank attach to his cows’ teats cups similar to those that were now attached to mine.
The following Saturday, Jay, a Canadian forestry expert who had retired to Sarawak, organised a hike in search of a lost antimony mine. It sounded like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but instead of locating an abandoned mineshaft, we spent three hours wandering through a leech-infested swamp. The peace of the forest was shattered by our intermittent screams.
Walking along a trail behind Jackie, I had a disturbing sensation in the region of my recently groomed crotch. I put my hand down the front of my walking trousers, pinched hard, and pulled out a small, black, squishy mass. It seemed like the tail end of something.
On hearing my scream, Jackie turned back. She dropped to a crouch in front of me and brandished a can of some type of critter zapper. I pulled down my pants and poked my pelvis in her face. She pointed the nozzle at my privates and pressed hard, releasing a stream of vapour. My screams soon turned to giggles.
A month later, I was in northern Thailand for some dental work. I’d been having uncomfortable sensations in my groin area. Googling “leech in vagina” was a very bad idea. I heard that a nearby hospital had a good reputation among local expatriates and fronted up to get my itch checked.
At the general admissions desk, I couldn’t make myself understood. On a piece of paper, I drew a diagram with a stick figure and an arrow pointing from a thick black squiggle to the crotch area. The girl nodded as if this was something she saw routinely and pointed to a sign that read “Obstetrics and Gynaecology”. There, I again produced my drawing. A nurse showed me to an examination room, handed me a robe, and waved her hand in a way that I understood to mean that I should remove my clothes.
A young male doctor knocked and entered. “How can I help you?”
“Um. I was in Malaysia … in the jungle … in a swamp. And there were leeches. And, um, I think one might have gone in my …” I pointed. “… in my vagina.”
His cheeks flushed pink.
“Ah … I will look. Sit in the chair and put your feet here.” He gestured at a pair of stirrups. Seating himself on a stool between my spread legs, he switched on a headlamp, picked up a probing instrument, leaned forward and started to poke around in my elderly innards. After a few minutes, he sat back. I was relieved to see that he was smiling broadly.
“Good news! No leech!”
The absence of a very small thing was much to celebrate.
This post first appeared in January 2022 as ‘This One Life: Celebrate the small things’, in www.startsat60.com, the website for digital-savvy baby boomers.
Another turning point
December 2021
I’ve spent the past two years sitting out COVID-19 in Australia, initially in Fremantle and Perth, and for the past 15 months in my hometown, Albury. While we all reeled in shock and waited for the world to return to something like normal, I got cracking on getting my book, Skinful, into publishable shape. Just as I was about to self-publish it, a publisher made an offer for Australian and New Zealand rights, and a publisher friend in England has taken rights for the UK and Ireland. Publication is now just a few weeks away and publicity has started.
I’m leaving Albury again on 4 January and will be based in Sydney until I return to Europe, hopefully at the end of March. Albury has been good to me again, but I’m not ready to call it my life.