Photo is by Ruth Rosengarten

OVER, is the story of a breakup as unexpected as it was predictable. The story is, drama aside, banal. A woman d’un certain age meets a man on an online dating app, they fall in into lust and then apparently into love too, but life gets in the way (his life) and he ditches her by email. The backdrop is the Covid 19 pandemic, that relationship laboratory (did yours survive it?).

The story is obviously mine, but it is equally obviously everyone’s, since we’ve all been subject (surely) to the vicissitudes of relationships, both the agent and object of hurt and rejection. We all feel our story as unique; we all smart in our own way. I wanted to write this out of anger, humiliation, vexation, hoping to achieve release, understanding, revenge too. But writing has its own ideas: once you are in its embrace, what matters is the text you produce, not the reality you’re referring you. And so the story, inasmuch as it is a story, began to take shape.

The first problem of writing this was how to make it interesting. She said and then he said is the terrain of gossip, and though many a writer has made a literary killing out of gossip (Proust is the prime example, but also Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and several poets) I’m not that sort of writer, at least not in prose. An ordinary ditching, painful as it might be, provides no plotline. To me this was a positive point, since I usually don’t know what to make of plot: novel plots are often full of unlikely coincidences, the essential arc seeming, to me, random and forced. But still, something needs to happen if one wants to keep a reader interested enough to turn the page. I wanted something more meandering than a storyline, and also more fragmentary, to suit the narrator’s agitated mind jumping back and forth between thoughts, trying to work out what just happened.

Serendipitously, I discovered the sestude, a form invented in the context of the art world, with which, as an artist and art historian, I am familiar. Here, from the forward to the book, is a description of a sestude written as a sestude:

Sestude

The term, minted in 2011, describes a nugget of thought with the stipulation that it contain precisely 62 words. That is the inversion of 26, the number of people enlisted, each to write one such piece about an item in the exhibition 26 Treasures at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The discipline, corseting a free-form snippet of reflection, suits my flickering attention.

The number sixty-two was relevant, since I was in my early sixties, and I made that the age of my narrator:

How it started

At sixty-two, I sign up to Tinder, swiping left and right, fast nights crazed with laughing and sending friends screenshots. Tibor, 48, walks away from what looks like an airport terminal carrying a rolling suitcase, wearing swimming trunks and a T-shirt. Steve 55, 127 kilometres away, loves banter and cheekiness and says he’s 100% single, and also very honest and genuine.

To remove the text from the terrain of memoir (a minefield), my characters were all nameless, structural: The Woman, The Man, Youngest Daughter, First Husband, Second Husband, and so on. This gave me the freedom of invention and elaboration, without forcing me to be tied to the literal truth of every detail. So, rather than being tethered to fact or fiction, I employed that happy convention of poetry where “the speaker” has the freedom to be, to a lesser or greater extent, removed from the writer, a looser structure than the personality-driven narrator of a first-person novel. The speaker is a version of the self perhaps, but not bound by autobiography, not intimidated by existing temporalities or empirical facts. The speaker’s voice is subjective, it is the “I” of the text, but arguably, she cannot be meticulously mapped back onto the writer’s personal life, or at least that is the convention. It is a delicious one to employ, to hide behind or flaunt. I may have invented some facts, shifted details and chronologies, and so forth. I moved things about as I built my text out of these 62-word fragments.

Slowly, a structure began to appear. The Woman and The Man are both widowed. The Man has three daughters, the youngest of which is still deeply afflicted by the death of her mother. The Man had evaded mentioning, on the dating app, that he’d been only one month widowed when he started swiping left and right on the app. It is essential we know that The Woman is childless (not child-free), and that we have some of her romantic back story to make sense of how and why she is invested in this relationship with a man she soon discovers to be newly widowed, who lives 200 kilometres away with a needy daughter.

Photo is by Ruth Rosengarten

I realised fairly early in the process that writing about a relationship can get maudlin, and reading about it can get boring. Different kinds of writing began to slip in, and in their repetition, they play a significant part: playlists made up of evocative music tracks that The Man sends The Woman, or that she composes for him; thoughts about lists and what they provide, psychically; discussions of works of art in which themes of desire, love and parenthood too appear. French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who made a book project out of a similar experience of being ditched (Prenez soin de vous/ Take care of yourself, 2007), plays a role (https://shorturl.at/70szX).

There are 62-word fragments of a more essayistic style slipped in, contemplating the nature of humiliation, of love triangles, of expectation, or parental duty. Most importantly, because the woman spends her days curled up (sometimes in bed in “the small room”), books and reading play a structuring role as she organises her thoughts around her reading, drawing threads together from other accounts of relationships ending or in trouble: Annie Ernaux Simple Passion (1991); Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story, (1995); Chris Kraus I Love Dick (1997); Anne Carson The Beauty of the Husband (2001); Elena Ferrante The Days of Abandonment (2002); Sharon Olds Stag’s Leap (2012); Jenny Offil’s Department of Speculation (2014) and Jane Feaver’s Crazy (2021), and sometimes their intertwining.

Crazy

As in Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story, in Crazy, Jane Feaver recognises the conflation of Ardu, the man she loves, with story, and so the wreck of the relationship is tightly bound to the story of the wreck. The story was mine, she writes, but it depended entirely on his being there, and without it, without him, I was lost

From Lydia Davis especially, I took permission to consider not only the end of a relationship, but how one writes about it, as proper material for a book.

The end of the story

How does a story like this – meandering, apparently drawn from ongoing life – end? Isn’t every story’s ending an artifice, a thing elaborately staged for the purported satisfaction of narrative closure? And is it even my story to tell? I push and pull and shape meaning out of these small dents in time, sweep up and leave my fingerprint in the dry dustings.

And then, at some point, there is the meta moment when The Woman begins writing and repeats the words that begin the book:

Dream

Second Husband appears in pyjamas after a long absence from my dream life. And in the optimism of this dream, The Man hasn’t yet left me, but still I am marrying Second Husband again. It is both ordinary and astonishing to see him, and so I say bloody hell, I thought you were completely dead, and then he smiles his world-changing, downturned smile.

No spoiler alerts, so I won’t mention how the book ends, but the comma in the title should reveal from the outset that any redemption or closure is out of the question.

Cover design Book design by Armée de Verre Bookdesign, Ghent, Belgium

OVER, took a long time to compose: the writing was only the start; how to order the fragments was essential for flow and a major part of the process. During the writing, I submitted the first 5000 words (which were never arranged in precisely the same order, though the first four sestudes were in place from the outset) to various competitions. I was lucky enough to have a composition of 62 sestudes published in Ambit, the cult British quarterly literary and art magazine that ran from 1959 to 2023, and reading at a launch party for that publication was my first public airing of the work. On the basis of those first 5000, the work was long- and shortlisted for various literary awards in the genres of fiction and memoir. Sadly, I had to withdraw it from the longlist of a fairly celebrated literary prize because I had already published a memoir (Second Chance: My Life in Things, 2022): I’d not read the darned small print. In 2022 it was shortlisted for second annual Discoveries Prize, a writing development program and prize organized by The Women’s Prize Trust, in partnership with Audible, Curtis Brown Literary Agency and Curtis Brown Creative. Its remit was to seek out “unagented, unpublished women writers in the UK and Ireland, offering them a chance to break into the publishing industry with their first adult fiction novel.” Here, my publishing track record in non-fiction (mostly as an art historian and art critic, plus the memoir) did not count. The shortlisting brought many perks but did not help me to find an agent or a publisher (the work was too niche, or “we’re looking for a more dynamic plotline”) but it did bring me into contact with the fifteen other long- and short-listed writers of the Discoveries Prize. We would meet regularly, often on zoom, and from those meetings, I developed a couple of good friendships. I also learned that there was no way I could be a “standard” fiction writer, concerned with discernible narrative arcs, timelines, character developments and so on; that I was more interested in fragments that combined essayistic writing with a certain contemplative lyricism, with flashes of irony and occasional humour. And so slowly, I edged towards writing poetry, and the kind of non-teleological writing that finds its home in poetry. I am now loving my new adventures in writing poetry, exploring form and voice so differently from anything I had done in my earlier non-fiction writing. I’m currently in the final quarter of an MA in writing poetry at The Poetry School: new friends, and a huge sense of possibility and even achievement in being a newbie in a different writing discipline.

Just as I was beginning to lose momentum in my desire to get the book out into the world, I met writer and publisher Elte Rauch, whose New Menard Press is the UK imprint of Amsterdam based indie publisher HetMoet. We clicked immediately and I wrote to ask her if she’d be interested in reading my manuscript. She asked me to send it, with the caveat that she wouldn’t have time to get back to me in less than a week. The next morning, I had an email from her saying she’d read the manuscript in one sitting and loved it. There was none of the usual ambivalence in her invitation to publish the book with her, and so we started working together. I was lucky to have poet, editor and translator Astrid Alban as editor/reader, and in my final revisions, the text lost about seven thousand of its forty thousand words, improving in concision and tautness with this diet. Some sestudes got rewritten in order to make sense where others had been removed; others were subject to a new reshuffle… and now it’s at the printers and almost ready to go out into the world. There was no way the cover could have any image: anything figurative would have felt too literal. I love the simple design, with embossed title, by Armée de Verre Bookdesign in Ghent.

Though the story is personal, the magical mediating power of words and the capacity (however small!) for the speaker to peel herself away from my person means that, so far, I do not feel too vulnerable or exposed, and am simply excited for OVER, to reach readers, and curious about their responses.

The publication date is May 7th.

Buy here - (New Menard Press https://www.thenewmenardpress.com/overruthrosengarten or bookshop.org. https://shorturl.at/65ZGS)

ruthrosengarten.com

1. We agreed with Susan Hyatt who created this post - Madonna didn’t embarrass herself at Coachella. She exposed you.

   ‘On Friday night at Coachella, Sabrina Carpenter had a surprise guest during her performance... Madonna walked out wearing the same lace bodysuit she wore in the dance tent in 2006 with the same boots and the same skin showing. She told the crowd it was a full circle moment, twenty years later, and then she and Sabrina did “Vogue” together, and then “Like a Prayer,” and somewhere in the middle they debuted a new song from Madonna’s upcoming album, Confessions II, out July 3.

   Madonna is 67. Sabrina is 26. My 13 year old self’s favorite with my latest favorite? It was, quite honestly, an electric and empowering moment.

   I’m a Gen X kid who built her whole aesthetic imagination around this woman. I made up dance routines to “Like a Virgin” in my best friend’s living room. I wore lace fingerless gloves to the mall. I watched Desperately Seeking Susan and thought, when I’m grown, I want to be cool like her . Madonna wasn’t just a pop star to girls like me. She was a permission slip. She told us our bodies belonged to us. That we could be sexual and smart and ambitious and weird and loud and none of it had to be apologized for. We could write the rules ourselves.

   So when I watched her walk hand in hand with Sabrina on Friday night, and then I watched the internet do what the internet does, I wasn’t surprised, but I was furious.

   “Somebody put grandma in a nursing home.” “Why is 67-year-old Madonna acting like a 17-year-old?” “Cringe.” “Dress your age.”

   Let me tell you what those comments actually are. They are not aesthetic opinions or fashion critiques. They are social enforcement.

   Here’s the rule women are supposed to follow.

   -Be beautiful, but only during a specific window.

   -Be desirable, but only for men, and only until you’re inconvenient.

   -Then vanish.

   Madonna has never once, in forty years, agreed to any of that. That is why they’re screaming.

   It’s worth saying what the plastic surgery conversation is really about, because women get reamed on both sides of it. Madonna has had work done. Demi Moore has had work done. Nicole Kidman has had work done. The comment sections have opinions on every millimeter of every face. Meanwhile, the same culture demanding these women age invisibly will crucify them the minute a single line appears. There is no winning. The game is rigged so the only acceptable outcome is disappearance. Work done? Vain. No work done? Letting yourself go. The punishment is the point.

   A lot of the loudest voices tearing Madonna apart online are other women. I’ve been thinking about this as a “lobsters in a pot” situation. If you’ve followed every rule, if you’ve shrunk on schedule, if you’ve gone quiet, if you’ve dressed appropriately, if you’ve turned down the heat on your own life because culture at large told you to, and then a 67 year old woman in a lace corset struts out under the Coachella lights and does “Vogue” with the biggest pop star of the year?

   Some women are going to feel rage. Not because Madonna did anything to them. Because she refused the deal they accepted. That refusal is unbearable to look at when you’re still trapped inside the contract.

   Now let’s talk about Sabrina Carpenter as she is one of the most interesting pop culture figures we have had in years.

   Sabrina is objectively, undeniably the whole package. Singer, actress, songwriter, comedian. Her music videos are tiny films with plot and insane wardrobe and violence and jokes. Watch “Taste.” Watch “Please Please Please.” Watch “Manchild.” And “Hour Tour.: Men get tied up. Men get buried. Men in her videos get exactly what they deserve. They are being told a specific, pointed, hilarious story by a woman who is in full creative control of the camera.

   There is a comment I saw recently from some guy online saying “no normal straight man likes Sabrina Carpenter’s music.” Sir, that is the entire point. Sabrina’s whole body of work is sexy, funny, clever, horny, winking pop written from inside a woman’s head for other women to enjoy. It’s the female gaze with a spotlight on it. It’s not for him. It was never supposed to be for him.

   His confusion is why he is camped out in the comments. There is a particular kind of male rage aimed at pop stars like Sabrina and Madonna.

   It is the rage that shows up when a woman is clearly, unmistakably, verifiably exceptional. Beautiful, and talented, and smart, and funny, and accomplished. And she is not delivering any of that exceptionality to him. Male entitlement tells him a woman this gifted owes him her attention. When she spends it on herself and on other women instead, he does not experience that as a preference. He experiences it as a theft.

   That is the rage you are seeing in the comments. It is not critique. It is grievance. A woman who should, by the rules of the system, belong to him, has opted out of the system, and he cannot tolerate it.

   On one side, men furious that these women are exceptional in a direction that excludes them. On the other side, women with unprocessed internalized misogyny furious that these women get away with breaking the rules. Two different angers, pointed at the same target, enforcing the same contract.

   Sabrina and Madonna are living proof you can survive that contract. You can refuse it at 26 and you can still be refusing it at 67, and the refusal compounds. The longer you do it, the bigger the stage gets.

   Sabrina is the inheritor. Madonna knows exactly what she is doing by showing up at her show. She has done this her whole career. She made a moment with Britney. She made a moment with Christina. Now she is making one with Sabrina. This is pop lineage. This is a queen saying, here, take the crown, wear it your way, I’ll be watching proudly.

   Twenty years ago at Coachella, Madonna was 47 and performing in the dance tent in a lace bodysuit the culture at the time tried to tell her she was too old to wear. On Friday, she put that same bodysuit back on at 67 and did it again. The outfit did not age out. The woman did not age out. The only thing that has changed is that now there are two generations of women standing behind her saying, yes, louder, do it again.

   Here is what I want women my age, and women younger, and women older, to take from this moment.

   You are allowed to still be here. You are allowed to still want things. You are allowed to be loud, and sexual, and ambitious, and fabulous, and ridiculous, and alive at 47 and 57 and 67 and 87. You are allowed to wear the bodysuit. You are allowed to headline your own life past the expiration date that was never real in the first place.

   They’re not mad about Madonna’s age. They’re mad she won’t shrink or go away.

   Be ungovernable. Age offensively. Put the lace gloves back on.’

   

   2. This was a post about a changing trend in obituaries - apparently, and we like this trend, they are getting closer to the bone. Not so many euphemisms and outright lies about them being a lovely person but more the nitty gritty as well as the glory. After all, that’s how it is.

3. We said - go Harry go. In that Harry Newton was the oldest London marathon runner at 88. Brilliant to hear.

4. There’s a new exhibition at the Welcome Trust and it’s called The Coming of Age. Which, of course, is right up our street. We haven’t made it yet but we intend to.

   ‘An exhibition that gives you hope about getting old. ★★★★

   The Times

   ‘The Coming of Age’ explores experiences and perceptions of ageing, from adolescence to later life, and asks how societies can adapt for us all to age better.

   Across the globe, people are living longer. One in ten children in the UK are expected to live beyond the age of 100. But who gets to live longer and ‘age well’? This exhibition explores how experiences of age are shaped by our environment, culture and society.

   ‘The Coming of Age’ features 150 artworks and objects, from historical artefacts to works by contemporary artists including John Coplans, Serena Korda, Suzanne Lacy, Anna Maria Maiolino, Rory Pilgrim, Paula Rego and more.

   Bringing together different perspectives from art, science and popular culture, this exhibition challenges assumptions about life stages and asks what greater longevity means for all of us.’

5. Artist, Joan Semmel busts the myth that you do all your good work in the earlier years. At 93, she says she’s doing her best work now. We agree.

She told Hyperallergic - ‘Joan Semmel’s boldly colorful, intimate paintings have radically shifted perspective from the male gaze toward a woman’s view.

At age 93, after more than 60 years as an artist, she believes her most recent paintings are among the best she has ever made.

“You say, ‘Fuck you. I’m good and you’re wrong,’” she told Hyperallergic. “This is who I am, this is what I do, and this is what I care about.”’

6. ‘Matthew Bannister is marking twenty years of Radio 4’s Last Word by looking at how our attitudes to death, dying and the way we memorialise our dead have changed. In this episode Matthew reflects on how the audience reaction to the announcement of his mother’s death set him thinking about how our attitudes towards death and dying have changed over the last twenty years. Matthew visits a death café in Sussex where the conversation covered subjects such as direct cremation, funeral costs and end of life plans. And Jimmy Caulty of The KLF speaks to Matthew about his plans to create a ‘peoples pyramid’ made of bricks containing the ashes of those who have died.’

   There are five programmes of 15 mins each. I’ll be listening.

Brighton Crones at CroneLines Disco in Sheffield, proudly sporting their crone tee’s by Twisted Twee. Pic credit Laura Page Photography for Crone Club.

“Crone is one of those words isn’t it,” says Rose Rouse in this fab piece ‘How to be Crone As Fk’ that she wrote recently for Tits to the Wind. It certainly is. I had the phone put down on me twice when recruiting older women to take part in our ‘Crone Spoken Library’, so strong were their objections to the word.

When I told mum five years ago that I was setting up a group called ‘Crone Club’, so that us perimenopausal women could learn from kick-ass older women (and each other), mum’s first response was: “I can see what you’re doing, but why do you have it to call it CRONE?!’ I explained that I’d picked ‘crone’ specifically because it was the most offensive word I could think of for an older woman. Even the sound of the word made me physically recoil.

First call for members of the Crone Club’s Facebook group, 2021.

Of course, when I disappeared down the crone rabbit hole, I soon discovered that I was actually part of a long-standing movement. My reading led me to books by 60’s feminists like Dr Jean Bolen’s ‘Crone’s Don’t Whine’ and Clarissa Pinkola Estés ‘Women who run with the wolves’. Both have written extensively about ‘the crone’ as a positive identity, with specific qualities that can only be achieved in later life. Later came Sharon Blackies wonderful books including Hagitude, and Victoria Smith’s ‘Hags’. Then I discovered organisations such as this wonderful group - the fabulous Advantages of Age - and designers such as Twisted Twee - all reclaiming pejorative terms for older women such as ‘hag’, ‘witch’, and my absolute favourite, ‘Chopped Liver.’ 👌🏽

The origins of Crone - and is now a good time to reclaim it?

Crone Club founder, Justine at CroneLines menopause disco in Sheffield.

In 2021 I did a presentation to fellow content geeks called ‘Rebranding Crone’. At the time, the top results from a quick Google of ‘crone’ confirmed my negative feelings about it. At best, the crone was described as a “Disagreeable or cantankerous old woman.” At worst, the word seemed to have derived from the Old Northern French word ‘caroigne’, and the English word ‘carrion’, literally meaning rotting meat or feted corpse.

“Why try and reclaim it then?” asks BBC Radio Sheffield’s Paulette Edwards in this interview for our crone human library. “Why not just come up with a new one?”

A fair point. But I’ve worked in brand storytelling for 30 years, initially as a copywriter for a design agency, then as a brand consultant. As a passionate believer in the power language in forming our identity, and as a lifelong feminist, I relished the challenge. As Susan Sontag said: “Any large-scale picturing of women belongs to the ongoing story of how women are presented, and how they are invited to think of themselves.”

In this post-truth world, I’d argue there has never been a better time for reclaiming the crone narrative. As my music hero Richard Hawley once said: “The most creative times in Sheffield’s history have been when our backs are against the wall and we’re sheckin like a shittin ‘dog.” So as soon as Chat GPT came out, I took to training it in the ways of the crone. As I feed my new friend regular meals of crone-related content, it now high fives me with comments like “THAT’S SO CRONE!” and we laugh together as I use a tool arguably created by the patriarchy, to analyse data that exposes it.

“Can you make me a graph that plots when the women over 50 in the TV series The Traitors were banished or killed in each series? Please.” (I’m always polite) My new friend is delighted and asks if I’d also like these women represented in Tarot Card format. Like I said, my AI pal seems to get what Crone Club’s trying to do better than I’ve been able to explain it to any human.

If there’s anything positive to take from the power-crazed narcissists running our world into the ground right now, it’s that our story can be whatever we say it is. And joy of joys, now you can pretty much find a definition of ‘crone’ to suit your chosen narrative and feminist position. Hands up if you’ve seen alternative narratives of the word’s origins such as this:

“Crone comes from crown, and is derived from the word cronus (time), indicating wisdom emanating from the head gained through life experiences. This is the time when life experiences help the woman shed the concern she has regarding judgment from others. It is the time when a woman can more confidently wear her crown unabashedly.”

So it seems the ‘reclaiming crone movement,’ thanks not least to the army of older women writers here on Substack, have successfully muddied the waters around the word’s origins. Google searches (especially AI ones) seem now well versed in the crone as an identity worth wanting. But whatever your feelings about A.I, Pandora’s box has been opened. And who knows, maybe if the crone movement gets stuck into training A.I in the way of the crone, it could become the most expedient way of changing the narrative of how older women are ‘invited to see themselves…’ (ok, I’m clutching at straws here!)

Crone as an identity and the challenge for the pro-ageing movement

I know so many strong, resilient, epically capable women, who feel shadows of their former selves when peri-menopause hits - crying, angry, anxious and full of self-doubt. I’ve seen amazing women abandon their careers that they’ve spent a lifetime building, just as their male counterparts are reaching their pinnacle. There’s no getting away from the fact that, for a large number of women, the symptoms of peri-menopause are fking shit.

So we tread a fine line, us in the ‘positive ageing movement’, as we attempt to dispel stereotypes of ageing and disrupt fear-based, overmedicalised menopause narratives. The very last thing I want to do is minimise women’s lived experience, and add an additional layer of expectation and pressure by making them feel they are failing by not living ‘their best crone lives’.

And yet, as an autistic woman, I’ve lived in fear all my life, and I REFUSE to be made to be fearful of what might happen to me in my ‘third act’. The patriarchy built his empire on male-only clubs and networks - Masons, Rotary Clubs, Magic Circle, Golf Clubs, Strip clubs - not to mention the horrifying global networks now being revealed as operating in plain sight. Imagine what older women could do if we connected with each other? Not that I’m against clubs per se. I still remember the excitement of receiving my ‘Young Ornithologists Club’ membership card aged eight, snug in its black wallet, and who didn’t want to be part of the exclusive Blue Peter badge holders club in the 1970s? What if we could make ‘Crone’ an exclusive club that younger women could actually feel privileged to join? Rumour has it that there are only TWO species on this planet where the female of the species doesn’t die when she comes to the end of her reproductive use. The toothed whale, and guess who? Yep, US! Now I’d say that’s a pretty exclusive club that we should be proud of joining.

Too young to be a crone?

It’s 2025 and we are at the Advantage of Age Awards in Hoxton. We are sitting in the gods, partly because we are skint, but also because that’s how convinced we were that we weren’t going to win. Much to our genuine amazement however, the Crone-of-Crones Suzanne read out ‘Crone Club Sheffield’ as joint winner of the ‘pro-ageing social club’. And it couldn’t have come at a better time, as I was struggling to earn a living wage, and was close to packing it in.

On my way back to my seat, a nice fella patted me on the back, but then said: “aren’t you too young to be a crone though?” At the tender age of 54, he has a point. Over the last five years, we’ve discovered that thinking about our lives in ‘three acts’ - maiden/mother/crone - was overly simplistic. And older crones are rightly fighting back. (Check out this furious piece by Crone Flloyd Kenedy on Medium ). And so we’ve created terms such as ‘Crone-in-Training’ for those in perimenopause and ‘Crone Elder’ for those 70+. Others in the pro-aging movement have dealt with this problem by coming up with new terms, such as Eleanor’s wonderful organisation ‘Noon’ and the identity of mid-life women as ‘Queenagers’.

Whatever your take, I still wanted to have some kind of new identity to look forward to rather than fear. A new roadmap with a set of qualities to look forward to and get in training for. Training for Ageing, if you will. Qualities that can only be achieved by number of years on the planet and by the unique, lived female experience of those who have existed for too long at the shitty end of the patriarchal stick.

What have we done so far?

The Facebook group of 10 fearful perimenopausal mates now comprises over 850 older women from all around the world. We run events such as the Crone Spoken Library in partnership with the University of Sheffield, and last year’s sell out event ‘CroneLines’ - an afternoon nightclub for perimenopausal and postmenopausal women. All the DJs were women in midlife and beyond (some DJing for the first time!) playing iconic female artists from across the generations from Nina Simone to The Pretenders to The Slits and of course, queen of the crones, Dolly Parton.

“It was brilliant dipping outside and seeing the young men driving past, with their jaws on their chest in disbelief at such a large noisy gathering of delightedly happy, chatty, dancing women - of a certain age!!”

Older women came from all over the UK - Brighton, London, Scotland, Northumberland. It was a disco with a difference as it kicked off with a few spoken word readings from Cathi Rae, and battle raps by 80 year old Manc Joy France. Angelina Abel led us in a dance performance based on her Angolan heritage, before the DJs commenced. Over a third of the tickets were bought by women coming on their own.

“I’ve made more friends tonight than I have in the three lonely years I’ve been living in Sheffield.”

Then we started regular Sheffield meet ups - usually hosted by a female business or venue as part of an attempt to kickstart a ‘crone economy’. At meet ups we try out taster ‘training for ageing’ activities - from boxing and the Alexander Technique, to Women’s Circles and literally going ‘Tits to the Wind!’ in local reservoirs. This year we’re organising the greatest number of crones on bikes and trikes the world has ever seen. Contact me if you can help!

Two years ago I started‘Tits to the Wind!’ here on Substack to see if we could raise money to keep Crone Club going. I write about the highs and lows of midlife and menopause from a northern lass perspective, and invite kick-ass older women to share the stories of their lives before they are lost to history.

A few months ago I was invited to do a Substack live with a wonderful crone called @Stacy Vajta from North Carolina to talk about the joy of Croning Ceremonies. I was introduced as being from Sheffield in the UK - the ‘crone capital of the world!’ And who knows, if we can get enough paid subscribers to keep Crone Club going, maybe we can make that goal a reality. Who’s in?

Get involved!

👉 Join Crone Club www.croneclub.org/join

👉 Buy The Most Expensive Tea Towel you will NEVER need with artwork by Crone of Corwen, Lyn Hodnett https://www.croneclub.org/shop/p/crone-teatowel

👉 Buy a CRONE A.F teeshirt https://www.croneclub.org/shop/p/crone-af-womens-relaxed-t-shirt

👉 Are you a woman wondering what to do next in your third act? Ever thought of creating a ‘legacy’ piece that captures your career highlights so that your hard work isn’t lost to future generations? Apply to join Juzza’s next cohort of The Academy of Dangerous Dreamers.

👉 Are you a ‘Crone Elder’ willing to share your top 10 for How to be Crone As Fk? Contact Juzza at Hello@justjuzza.co.uk

👉 Subscribe to Crone Club’s Substack - ‘Tits to the Wind’ (all welcome, male allies especially!)

Tits to the Wind - Crone Club e-magazine

Our monthly contribution to creating a kick-ass crone identity and positive roadmap for female ageing and menopause, one messy story at a time. Curated by Crone Club founder, Crone-in-Training Juzza, from Sheffield UK, or sometimes from her fella's van.

By Justine Gaubert

👉 Join our Private Members Facebook Group (women only.) https://www.facebook.com/groups/companyofcrones

👉Follow us on insta (all welcome!) https://www.instagram.com/crone_club_reclaiming_crone/

👉 And finally, but most importantly of all, support the work of and by becoming paid subscribers, and help two top crones continue their cronetastic work.

1. So excited to hear about this DJ Collective who are all Over-60 playing everything from rap to pop to soul and funk. They are called Fresh Forever and boast one DJ who is 90. Leading the way. They were shown performing in Cologne.

2. One of our favourite people - Mary Beard who is always fighting for rights. This time, she is stopping the far right from claiming the classic myths. In the Herald -

   ‘Awful people can be correct’: Mary Beard talks the past and present || Neil Mackay

   When Beard comes across far-right figures trying to claim the classics as their own, she confronts them – not in anger, but with facts. But she adds: “I’d be lying if I said I’d a fantastic success rate, but it’s having the argument that’s important.”

   She recalls a Twitter row she got into with ‘the far right’ over a BBC cartoon which “showed a senior official in Roman Britain as a person of colour. It produced an absolutely predictable fightback – ‘wokery gone mad’ etcetera etcetera. Look, first you say: this is just a cartoon. Then you say: we know there was a governor of Roman Britain who came from Algeria”.

   She shakes her head in bewilderment and adds: “I discovered – and I’d been very naive – that there were loads of people who had somehow picked up the idea that there was no immigration to this country before the 1960s, or that Windrush was when it all started. It’s simply not true.”

   Beard even went so far as to put up articles on her faculty website at Cambridge to provide “evidence for diversity”. She came in for torrents of abuse – including the “silly old c**t” line.

   Although we can never know the true ethnic make-up of Roman Britain, “there were clearly people of colour here. What we must do, when we’re thinking about Roman Britain, or any province of the Roman Empire, is shut our eyes and imagine that”.

   The far right, she believes, lack imagination, and just “block out any idea that there were people of colour here”. A tombstone found in South Shields bears the name of a British woman called Regina, a freed slave married to a Syrian soldier in the Roman army.

   

   3. Singer, Rhoda Dakar tells the story of her visit to Music is Black, a new exhibition at the V&A. ‘I went to ‘The Music Is Black’ at the new Victoria and Albert Museum East with my son, Frenchhh (aka Parizien). His first audible gasp was seeing a photo that lives on the wall in our front room reproduced in a museum! The fact that my Marc Griffith London suit perfectly matched the background was kismet! My dad died before my children were born, so these snippets are what they have to know him by.’

4. Canada’s David Walker finished a triathlon at 75 with Parkinson’s. That is one determined man. Well done to him. Wowee.

5. Really happy to hear that there will be one final instalment of 70 UP, the documentary that has enthralled us for years about the lives of these participants since they were 7. It will be on ITV. ‘For over 60 years, one documentary series has done something no other programme has ever managed — follow the same group of people from childhood right through to old age.

   It started back in 1964 with 7 Up, checking in on a group of seven-year-olds and asking simple questions about their lives, their hopes, and what they thought the future might hold. Every seven years, the cameras came back… watching as those children became teenagers, then adults, then parents and grandparents.

   Over the decades, viewers have seen everything — careers, marriages, divorces, struggles, successes, heartbreak, and moments of real joy. It’s never been about drama or headlines, just real lives playing out over time.

   Now, the story is coming to an end.

   The final instalment will see the remaining participants reflect on everything — what they achieved, what didn’t quite go to plan, and how their lives turned out compared to what they imagined all those years ago.

   Familiar faces return, including the lad who once dreamed of being a jockey, the boy who wanted to be an astronaut, and others whose journeys have taken unexpected turns along the way. There are also emotional moments remembering those no longer with us, alongside reflections from participants who stepped away from the series years ago.

   What’s always made Up stand out is probably the format. It simply shows how life unfolds — shaped by class, opportunity, luck, and the choices people make along the way.

   Those behind the series have called the final chapter “epic and moving,” and say it’s as much a reflection of society as it is the individuals themselves — a rare record of real life captured over decades.

   It’s the end of something truly unique on British television… and for many, it will feel like saying goodbye to people they’ve grown up with.

   70 Up will air on ITV later this year.’ From Classic TV.

6. This was a report in the i paper. Carol Decker from T’Pau says she is still feeling into sex with her partner at 68. Good for her. And I wondered out loud if she was taking testosterone. Several members of AofA confirmed that they are - and that their libido is alive and kicking…

Photo by Gustavo Fring

It used to be so easy didn’t it – dating, sex, and relationships? Back in the days of being 20-something, there was such a choice of men (or whatever gender you were into). If you fell out of one relationship, you could just fall right into another.

In fact the way I remember it, “dating” as such didn’t really happen. You could just go to a party, get a bit pissed, end up snogging someone in the corner, and that would, or wouldn’t, get things started off.

Nowadays, there aren’t so many parties, at least not ones where you could get away with that sort of behaviour. And online dating? Well that seems stacked in favour of the young and beautiful.

Finding a partner after 50 seems fraught with difficulty, but it certainly can be done. I’ve done it myself and I’ve built a business – Dating Evolved – where I run a program to help older women with this exact same thing and with tons of success stories.

But to get into a good position to meet a quality man, one of the most important things we need is a positive mindset (see this post to understand why).

And so to that end I’d like to point out some of the serious advantages that we older women have in the quest for a partner. We have plenty of reasons to be cheerful.

Yes - really honestly. Read on…

1. Menopause & onwards is the perfect time for new adventures.

The thing is, menopause does not signal that we’re old or done for – it’s actually a biological gift.

It’s when your body says,

“Right, I’m done with making babies, and going through all the hormonal cycles, menstruation, mood swings, competition and all that palaver, and now I’m going to spend my energy on having new missions, new adventures, and I can bestow my wisdom and my productivity on my family, my social group or for the greater good!”

That is WHY we evolved to have menopause, and to have a chunk of life beyond reproductive age!

I know that for some it can be a pretty difficult time dealing with various symptoms and of course there’s a plethora of advice out there on how to deal with these, but for now I want to emphasise the point that menopause isn’t about being on the way out, it’s about having new opportunities.

So it means is that we’re released from the shackles of reproduction and we can base our choice of partner on what we would like in our lives, not on who we want to be the father of our kids, or who’d be a good bet for increasing our status or wealth (yes, these play a big part in who younger women are attracted to, although we might not have been conscious of the fact). And we’re in the fortunate position nowadays not to be restricted by old-fashioned values about how we should act at this age.

Y’know there’s no rule that says when we hit 50 we have to quietly go off into a corner and become invisible.

Let’s face it – our 50s, 60s and 70s nowadays aren’t what they used to be. As long as we’ve looked after ourselves, our middle and later years can be a whole new journey. Our kids, if we have them, have left home or at least getting old enough not to take up all our time, and we’re still able and hopefully healthy enough to try new stuff, have amazing escapades and get into a fantastic new relationship.

2. We don’t have to find a good father for our babies

Being of post-reproductive age also means we can decouple ourselves from the desires we used to have on the basis of genetic quality. We’re not looking for a good genetic father for our kids when we’re looking for a partner (and btw we’re attracted to the genetic traits in men when we’re younger whether we’re planning to have kids or not).

This potentially means that you might be in a better position to choose a partner on the basis of having qualities that will make them good at relationships rather than being so concerned about the chemistry.

So you can choose someone who will make you happy!

I’ll let you into a secret: Generally the men that younger women really get the hots for are not those who are especially likely to make them happy. Our biology doesn’t care about happiness.

Now we’re older, our hormones can actually start working in our favour!

How do they do that? You may ask.

Well, when women are at the reproductive stage of life, they tend to have a slight penchant for masculine looking men, especially at times of the month when they’re experiencing peaks in levels of the hormone oestrogen and can get pregnant. Researchers speculate that this preference exists because masculine, dominant, men – those with higher levels of circulating testosterone - are thought to be healthier and potentially of higher genetic quality than their less macho peers. Important if they might be the father of your kids.

So women with high oestrogen levels often want men with high testosterone levels.

The problem with high T men though is that they can spell trouble in relationships – potentially prone to infidelity and general bad behaviour. But for women in their reproductive years they’re often irresistible, in spite of being a pain in the ass.

What about post-reproductive women then? We don’t need a good genetic father for the kids so are we still attracted to masculine men?

To find out the answer to this question, a team led by evolutionary psychologist Tony Little, then at the University of Stirling, tested women’s preference for men in photos – where levels of masculine or feminine appearance had been adjusted to vary.

When they tested reproductive aged women they found, as expected from previous research, a small degree of preference for masculine looking male faces. But when they tested pre-pubescent girls, and women of post reproductive age, none of whom experience the monthly spikes in oestrogen or can get pregnant – they found that these participants preferred male faces that were a bit more feminine.

It makes perfect sense. What’s the point in going for a masculine bloke and putting up with the costs of a high testosterone partner when you can’t get the good gene benefits?

Women who are going through, or are past menopause are more likely to want a good companion than good genes - although of course they may well want good sex too! But while young women will be prone to chasing “bad boys”, it appears that for older women like us, our hormones are working in favour of our relationship happiness!

Photo by Kampus Production

3. We don’t have to worry about a loudly ticking biological clock

We’re in a much more relaxed position than the women maybe 10, 20 or 30 years younger than us that are worrying about declining fertility and desperate to find a man to have babies with.

Single women in their late 30s and early 40s who’d like to start a family are, sadly, in a particularly tricky position because men of their own age and older who are in the market for baby-making will usually be aiming to partner up with someone in their 20s or early 30s. This really cranks up the pressure for these older reproductive-age women. Once we’re past 45 and heading into our 50s or older, we’re done with that.

Assuming you’re a woman in the target audience for this Substack, either you’ve had kids or you haven’t but it’s unlikely that you’ll be giving birth any time soon. You’re not in the competition then for broody males, or “the one” to set up home and have children with.

That’s a relief!

Photo by Kampus Production

4. We can take it or leave it – we’re independent!

We older women can afford to try things out and we can leave a relationship if we don’t like it. We know we won’t get caught up in being dependent on a guy because of children and needing him to help look after them and fund them.

We can make up our own rules around the relationships we have. They can be casual, they can be LAT (living apart together), we can co-habit or we can tie the knot – we and our partners choose.

And no chance of getting swamped by nappies and having sleepless nights because of crying babies. We can spend our time on our relationship and enjoying being together, which seems like a recipe for success to me.

So… there you go, plenty to be happy about for older women in the dating game. I hope this helps you feel more positive about getting out there to find your great guy!

But of course I know there are challenges, as in, you need to know…

· How to successfully run the gauntlet of the aforementioned online dating

· How to feel confident in your own attractiveness

· How to identify the men who could make you happy and avoid the wrong ‘uns

· How to desire a good guy

· Where and how to meet and connect with good men in real life

Well as it happens, I’ve got just the thing to help you with this. If you’re ready to get proactive to find a lovely, compatible partner, you might like to come along to my FREE MASTERCLASS next Tuesday (28^th) at 7pm BST:

The 5 Essentials for Successful Dating

~ for Women over 50

In this class, I’ll introduce you to my scientific approach for finding the right man for you and I’ll tell the story of how I myself successfully changed my ways and found the love of my life in my 50s. And I’ll go through the points above and show you how to get them nailed. Time for Q&A at the end too.

You can register >>HERE<< and there’ll be a replay available for a couple of days after.

See you then :)

Much love,

Mairi

1. This was a piece in the Washington Post - ‘In a recent episode of the popular HBO Max medical drama “The Pitt,” an emergency department nurse moonlights as a death doula for a woman with terminal cancer. While birth doulas have become a familiar part of modern health care, the idea of a death doula — someone who supports people through the dying process — may be less familiar.
   
   “A death doula is a calm, compassionate presence who can be there for dying people and their loved ones in their final moments,” said Kristen Patterson, a death doula and end-of-life planner in Virginia.
   
   From advocating for patients with medical providers to offering emotional comfort through reading or playing music, death doulas can support both the dying person and their caregivers. They share insights into what they’ve learned about the end of life.’ And so I asked if our members would like a death doula to accompany them to death. I would. But not everyone was in favour.

2. This was a piece in the Huff Post where the writer said that she really wanted people/friends/family to ring her when her husband died. But not many did. They sent messages. And for the writer, that was not enough. So I asked what people would like? And quite a lot of them only wanted a few precious people in their lives to phone… they were happy with messages. I think it was obvious that we’re all individuals who need different things at different times so I think it’s best to say what we’d like.

3. Fascinating article in the Guardian about the needlework/artwork by Elizabeth Allen who had a flurry of interest in her pieces - after artist, Patrick Heron visited and spread the word - and then it all disappeared again. She died in 1967 and now there is an exhibition in Worcestershire’s Folk Museum of her work. They are vibrant, unusual pieces.

4. We were sad to hear that singer with Clannad, Moya Brennan had died at 73. She lived with her husband, Tim Jarvis who is a photographer, and children, in Donegal. I knew Tim when I worked for music paper, Sounds, he was often the photographer for the evening.

5. ‘Good Grief Hastings will explore how creativity, conversation and community can help people support one another through grief and loss. Taking place over the late May Bank Holiday weekend, the four-day festival will bring people together for talks, workshops, music, film and creative experiences that open up compassionate conversations about death and bereavement.

   The festival is produced by local events organisation 18 Hours, in partnership with St Michael’s Hospice, Good Grief Festival CIC and the University of Brighton, as part of the £2.4 million Coastal Community and Creative Health project, a national research initiative exploring how creative community activity can improve wellbeing and help tackle health inequalities in coastal towns, including Hastings.

   Good Grief Hastings creates a welcoming space for people to share stories, engage with specialists in grief support and the creative arts, and take part in thoughtful and inspiring workshops. Through music, visual art, film, performance and discussion, the festival challenges the taboos around death and loss, encouraging open and tender conversations.

   Across the weekend, audiences can expect Remembrance walks, storytelling events, talks, film screenings, live music, performance and arts exhibitions. There will also be opportunities to explore grief through shaping clay, weaving, writing, dancing and creating together in shared spaces. Some moments will be quiet and reflective, others communal and energising.

   Where it began

   Good Grief Festival was founded in 2020 by Professor Lucy Selman at the University of Bristol. Originally created as an online event during the pandemic, it responded to a time when many people were grieving in isolation.

   Since then, it has grown into a nationally recognised festival, bringing researchers, healthcare professionals, artists and communities together to talk openly and creatively about grief. Recent in person editions, including Good Grief Weston, have transformed community spaces into places for reflection, conversation and support, attracting thousands of participants across the UK.

   Now, this nationally recognised festival comes to Hastings, shaped by local partners and rooted in the town’s strong cultural and community networks.

   Quotes

   Dr Mandy Curtis, Director of 18 Hours and Senior Lecturer at University of Brighton’s School of Business and Law, said:

   “Good Grief Hastings is about creating space for grief in all its ways. Grief is not only about the loss of a person. It can be about changes in our lives, our health, our relationships or our sense of identity. By bringing this festival to Hastings, we hope to offer a welcoming and creative environment where people can explore those experiences openly, through conversation, making and shared moments.”

   Amalabandhu Chandler, Bereavement and Spiritual Support Services Lead at St Michael’s Hospice, said:

   “While everyone experiences grief at some point in their lives, many people face isolation and loneliness when coping with the loss of someone close to them. These feelings can have a profound impact on mental health and wellbeing.

   Through arts and creative expression, Good Grief Hastings will create welcoming spaces where people can come together to reflect, connect and talk openly about grief in accessible and supportive ways. The festival will bring people together through conversation, creativity and shared reflection, helping to normalise discussions around loss while strengthening both individual and community resilience.

   By sharing experiences and engaging in creative activities, participants can feel less alone in their grief and more supported by those around them. Over time, this approach helps foster greater compassion, stronger social connections and a more open culture around grief, supporting healthier, more resilient communities for the future.”

   Professor Nigel Sherriff, Director of the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender and Professor of Public Health and Health Promotion at the University of Brighton, said:

   “Coastal communities often face significant health inequalities, but they also have rich creative and cultural networks that can play an important role in supporting wellbeing. This festival shows how creativity can help open up conversations about difficult experiences such as grief and loss, while bringing people together in supportive and meaningful ways. As the South East lead for the Coastal Community and Creative Health project, the University of Brighton is proud to support initiatives like this that demonstrate the real potential of community creativity to improve health and wellbeing.”

   ---

   If you have any queries about this festival, please contact us at office@18hours.org.uk

   If you have any queries about bereavement, please contact St. Michael’s Hospice at Bereavement@stmichaelshospice.com’

6. We’d like to see this idea explored more by the government. There are apparently over 1 million empty homes in the UK and the Big Issue suggests that they are renovated so that the homeless can move it. We agree.

Photo by Peter Wallis of Victoria accepting the AofA Award.

Victoria Keen is one half of the amazing international online festival Lifting The Lid which jointly won Advantages of Age’s Grooviest End of Life Organisation, she’s also a funeral director at NSW Funerals. Here she tells the fascinating stories of how she has fulfilled clients’ wishes around clothing or hair colour for their loved one. Either that or the request of the person who died.

I once dressed a man in a white Elvis jumpsuit.

I sprayed his hair black and shaped it into the signature quiff he wore when performing as Elvis — exactly as he would have chosen.

And so - we honoured him exactly as he wanted to be seen — bold, unmistakable, fully himself.

In my work, these requests rarely arrive as declarations. They come gently, often with hesitation.

“Could they wear their woolly jumper? They always felt the cold.”

Sometimes the clothes arrive folded carefully in a bag. Sometimes they are handed over with an apology — that they’re a bit worn. The fabric soft from years of wear, cuffs slightly frayed.

But those are the things we reach for first.

Because these aren’t just clothes. They are every day ritual. Memory. A way of being.

We take care of the small, specific things that matter — the threadbare clothes that have been loved for years, or, in some cases, fulfilling a final request that reflects who they truly were.

One gentleman’s hair had turned white during his illness, as he had stopped colouring it. But his final wish was to have it coloured black again for the service, so people would recognise him as they had always known him — the man he had been all his life.

He was to have an open casket. People would see him.

He had been a presence at his church for decades. That was how people knew him. That was who he needed to be.

Honouring this request was a way to preserve his identity, even in death.

These choices honour the person as they understood themselves, long before anyone else sees them.

We do it because it matters — not for anyone else, but for them and the people who love them.

There is something profoundly human in these requests.

We are often told, subtly or otherwise, that certain things shouldn’t matter as we get older. That appearance is vanity. That we should become less visible. Age, it seems, is supposed to come with a gradual dimming. A softening of edges. An acceptance of invisibility.

And yet, at the end of life, the opposite reveals itself.

The people who love us remember exactly who we were. Not in broad strokes, but in details. The clothes we reached for. The way we wore our hair. The small things we would have adjusted before leaving the house.

They don’t ask for perfection.

They ask for recognition.

I think often of my friend Jessi.

Photo of Jessi by Matthew Hoare

I met Jessi through a community project in South East London. They were impossible to miss — and would have been deeply offended if you tried.

You might see them cycling up the hills of Crystal Palace in four-inch heels, long grey hair streaming behind them. Or walking through South London in a tiny bikini, wearing a pair of papier-mâché breasts they had made themselves, paired with impeccable heels.

Jessi didn’t just exist in the world. They insisted on being seen.

In fact, one of the things that frustrated them most was the instinct to look away.

“Why is nobody looking at me?” they would ask.

For Jessi, this wasn’t about performance. It was about feeling like themselves.

They told me they identified as a man, but chose to dress as what they described as “the most sexy woman” because it made them feel good.

Jessi could be challenging. But if you met them honestly, they respected that.

At their funeral, the details mattered just as much as they had in life.

Music which they had composed was played. A recording of Jessi speaking — explaining, in their own words, why they dressed the way they did — filled the room.

When the time came, I dressed Jessi myself. I put flowers in their hair. And I made a decision with their closest friend — we would not close Jessi’s mouth. Jessi would absolutely have come back to haunt us if we had.

They were still unmistakably Jessi.

That, I think, is what all of this comes down to.

Join us to look at what we’ve been passionately discussing in AofA’s FB group this week.

1. Jane Fonda 88, and Joan Baez 85, in this intimate, reflective photograph. They are still campaigning against Trump and against the wars/occupation and we need them desperately. I am writing this just as Trump is threatening to use nuclear weapons on Iran. We must spe…

Read more

At the top of the hill

83 years old, it is no doubt inevitable that I look back at the years gone by. I look at me today and look around at friends who, like me, inhabit Oldenland, the country of old age. I look ahead to a not so distant horizon.

Read more

Me in my garden taken by my son, Marlon Rouse Tavares

The term Bucket List makes me want to die quicker so that I don’t have to have one! Well, not really but I do detest the term.

Kick the bucket is, of course, another way of saying to…

Read more

1. This wonderful headwear is by Noisy Threads and I found different examples on Insta. I asked the group what they thought and would they wear one? Some were an absolute No and others a Yes…. I m…

Read more

What do you think happens to your brain and central nervous system as you age? We know that left to its own devices - our brain will shrink with age. Maybe you are already blaming balance/memory issues on your age? Perhaps you are feeling less tolerant/more fixed in outlook/more restricted in your life and feel with age your nervous system has altered i…

Read more

This week, we’ve got everything from Prospect Cottage in Dungeness to Anouchka Grose, psychotherapist and author’s guide to Shrinking Your Personal Economy.

1. Derek Jarman, wonderful filmmaker, bought a fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness i…

Read more

Weston-super-Mare at night

The Move

It wasn’t planned. We spent thirty years in a rented flat in Bath Spa, busy with life and work. No thought ever given to what we might do and where we might do it in retirement. But an idea was born, …

Read more

1. This is great to hear from Sharon Stone who is a star on the pro-ageing front. I keep meaning to start a daily gratitude practice as i…

Read more

‘£250,000! That’s a lot of money for us to receive’, I whispered to my husband.

I noticed twinges of guilt, embarrassment, shame move through me. I felt awkward. More than awkward – I wanted to disappear, overwhelmed by the thought tha…

Read more

This week we move from Grace Jones at 77 to Water Cremations… our usual sort of tangentiality in fact.

1. Grace, Grace, Grace - still giving it out big time. Touring in Australia, she’s beyond a wild performer and at 77 inspiring us all. In The Age -

   ‘Hula-hooping and a nip slip: Grace Jones delivers chaos and fun at St Kilda gig.

   On an ominous, stormy night …

Read more

We’re at that age when we are supposed to be talking about bucket lists. But I’ve only ever had one item on mine, and it’s been there since I was five years old. Ever since I learnt how to read, I’ve wanted to write a book.

I’m 68 now …

Read more

1. We always love to celebrate our AofA members. And this is Marisa Mendez - who has been having a tough health time recently - in one of her wonderful outfits. Marisa was the joint winner of our Style Queen award 2025 and she deserves accolades for what she creates in terms of clothes and looks. She often makes them herself. Marisa, you are a star.

Read more

Becca on the left….and another AofA member, Debbie Golt in the middle and Kaya M on the right…the Vinyl Sisters at the Ritzy Upstairs in Brixton

‘Stress and overwhelm interspersed with moments of wonder’. This is how I described my life last March, in a co-listening session that came through AofA. We were taking our first steps out of a dreige winter. It…

Read more