Susan Green

I borrowed A Dream in the House from the Bendigo Library one sweltering summer in the early 1980s.  I thought it was very weird. Possibly the weirdest children’s book I’d ever read.
Or was it just the heat, and fever dreams?
Whatever it was, its strangeness and unique poetic intensity haunted me (like another book – Moon Eyes –  by the same author) and after searching for  years, I finally managed to get hold of a copy a month ago.

It begins:
Here is a large green garden, and you are in it.

Poole describes the trees and flowerbeds and the river nearby, and the house, two-hundred and fifty years old, “solid, comfortable and matter-of-fact”.

But look again at the house, now that the sun has set and only gilds the rims of the chimney pots and the highest copper beech trees. Aren’t the straight windows staring very like eyes? And the straggle of wistaria over the porch gives the place an untidy, almost hairy look. Now, would you dare to go up to that green front door and pull the old-fashioned bell? And if you did, would anybody answer it? And if they did, who?
You are standing on the lawn in front of the neat West Country residence called Colt Lunges. What will happen next?

I will tell  you – not the ghost story or supernatural mystery you might expect (think the Green Knowe books, or Tom’s Midnight Garden) from this fairly standard beginning.

Our thirteen-year-old heroine, Jane, arrives at Colt Lunges with her parents. Jane is a twin, but her sister Ann was lost in a storm at sea when she was a baby.  She explores the house and garden, makes a friend of the motherly housekeeper, avoids her overwrought mother, meets the vicar and his daughter, finds an old diary, learns a little of local and family history. Her ancestor, a judge, had a group of teenagers transported to Australia for stealing the church treasure. The boys were shipwrecked, and drowned. And then his daughter, another Ann, was kidnapped and never seen again.

Dream-like events (some magical, some terrifying) multiply. Plants sing and dance. The river tries to drown her. A ghost gardener, Tom, who speaks in rhyme, joins her in dreams. They search for Ann. For the two Anns; Ann, who disappeared over a century ago, and Jane’s drowned twin.
Tom and Jane find themselves on an island located through a crack in the wall, hidden behind a turtle shell, in the attic. On the beach, Jane is menaced by an army of crabs – “as big as dinner plates, they crouched like armoured spiders among the rocks, blue-black, bow-legged and malevolent”. Up on the land, plants and flowers seethe with vicious insects and snakes. Guided by Tom, she crawls through tunnels and caves, a stifling slimy maze under the sea, until she finds herself in a huge cavern, “a chapel shaped cavern, whose walls were a mosaic of rubies and pearls”.

It was indescribably splendid, immeasurably rich, and should have been infinitely beautiful but it was not. The rubies that studded the walls and hung from the ceiling glowered crimson, as if they would burn at a touch, and the pearls that should have been as pure as lilies were cold and hard and it was from them that the foul smell came.

It gets more bizarre. They find Ann, mute and cold as a statue, guarded by a mythical, magical serpent.

In its eyes was the solution to all mysteries: if you looked into them you understood the  language of birds and animals, you saw into the depths of the sea, you heard what was spoken under the earth and the music of stars. Those eyes stared at Jane and willed her to stare back into them and lose herself in their magic.

After a battle to the death (both Tom and the serpent) the girls struggle back through the caves and tunnels into the attic, and down into the house.
Where their parents seem to placidly accept Ann’s reappearance. And life goes on at Colt Lunges…
Jane has gained Ann, but lost something of herself. Is it her imagination, or in fact the gift of seeing the unseen?

It is odd, Jane thought, that I had to sacrifice for Ann that bit of myself that I valued the most, and yet instead of holding it against her I love her the more for it. It has made her even more precious. Perhaps that part of me went with Tom. That part of me with wings that could fly through time, and the eyes that saw roses dancing, is waiting now with him. I must always remember that the magic has not gone out of the world, just because it has gone out of me…

Yes, I was right. It wasn’t the heat, all those years ago: A Dream in the House is a seriously weird book. Unsettling, intense. Magical, and macabre. Nightmarish. I can’t imagine it getting published today. I can’t actually imagine the child who would really enjoy it, either. But I may be underestimating children.

Book groups. I’ve been in a couple, and they’re fun. Held after dinner, with wine (always with wine!) and something (from basic cheese-and-biscuits to lavish platters) to nibble. There is always a lot of talk, and only some of it about books. But a growing dislike of going out at night and a disinclination to drive out into the back-blocks (my night sight is awful, and there are always kangaroos leaping out in front of the car) has seen me take a break from my evening group this year.
At a recent meeting, the library manager told the Friends of the Library members that the staff are often asked about whether the library could run a book group. Could the Friends help?

Was she looking straight at me? Maybe, maybe not, but I put my hand up and this week we’ve just had our first meeting. A do-able time of 5 till 6, no wine but tea/coffee and TimTams on hand. A lovely bunch of people, and even a waiting list. Our local library system has over 300 sets of 10; I’ve asked the members to select something from the list but in the meantime I chose, more or less at random, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. I had a memory of enjoying The Transit of Venus in my twenties. I kind of assumed this was about the Great Fire of London. One of the book group members put me right.
“The Great Fire,” he said, “is the atomic bomb. It’s about World War II.”

Which seemed like a fitting coincidence, because the book I’ve just finished was also about the war. The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food is a fascinating popular history that provides an unfamiliar slant on the causes and conduct of the wars in Europe and the Pacific. Cycling through the different phases of the war, Lizzie Collingham first examines the situations in 1930s Germany and Japan. In both countries, the vulnerability of their own food supplies and reliance on imports hampered their potential as world powers.
The solution? Create an Empire. Germany and Japan both looked enviously at Britain, with its colonies and dominions supplying the nation’s needs for food and raw materials and acting as a market for British manufactures. How did they go about empire building? Invading neighbouring countries, for a start. Germany saw Eastern Europe as a massive farm and the Soviet inhabitants expendable. Japan had a similar plan when it invaded Manchuria.

From this beginning, Collingham takes in the logistics of supply and distribution, agricultural and nutritional science, politics and military strategy, and national and class differences. It is at times difficult reading. Over 20 million people starved to death or died of the diseases of malnutrition in WWII. Sometimes the deaths were incidental to the prosecution of the war; sometimes they were part of a deliberate policy of withholding sustenance. The Nazis “Hunger Plan” was basically the intention to starve whole populations to death by requisitioning all supplies. When, later in the war, this plan proved too slow (the Soviets, used to food shortages, were particularly resilient) the murder of so-called “useless eaters” was stepped up in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Both Germany and Japan exported hunger, but the Japanese government and military did not spare their own people. Soldiers and citizens alike were expendable; fighting spirit and national pride was supposed to sustain them. I was astonished to read that Japanese fighting men had to fend for themselves. Initially when there were still supplies, they cooked their own meals. Later, malnourished soldiers foraged for whatever they could find, existing on boiled grass and leaves, frogs, snakes and insects and eventually resorting to cannibalism in some cases.

The Allies don’t come out of this book as angels, either. Churchill attributed the millions of deaths from the 1943 famine in Bengal to “too many people” rather than bad policy on the part of the British. His refusal to lift the blockade resulted in the deaths of thousands of Greeks. And the American insistence on a virtually non-negotiable content of around 4,000 calories per day for its soldiers led to the situation of Allied civilians and military on an austere diet while the GIs in their midst were gorging.

Finally, Collingham’s look at global farming and agricultural networks through the lens of WWII history makes for sobering reflections about the future of food in the ever-warming climate of the 21st century…

I promised myself to read more new books this year (new to me, I mean), and so I have been trawling through the library catalogue and earmarking any titles that take my fancy. I have 21 books on reserve at present! My fancies seem to coincide with lots of other borrowers, so that there’ll be a week or two with no books and then three or four come in all at once. Feast or famine.

It was famine last week. Since we were heading off to the Grampians/Gariwerd for a holiday, I needed something riveting to read in case it rained all the time. So I took with me a couple of James Lees-Milne’s wartime diaries,  Ancestral Voices (1942-3) and Prophesying Peace. (1944-5). James Lees-Milne? Who? He’s sometimes called ‘the man who saved England’. But we’re talking architecture, not military strategy – he was employed from 1942 to 1947 to inspect and assess historic buildings offered to the National Trust.
At that time, the National Trust was mainly concerned with preserving notable landscapes; it owned 75,000 acres but had less than ten historic houses open to the public. These houses weren’t seen as a vital part of the country’s heritage; consequently if the owners didn’t have the funds for upkeep, they were demolished or left to decay. Requisitioned for wartime use, some of them were being severely damaged. Into the breach leaped a small, amateurish but committed band of National Trust employees. Lees-Milne had an insatiable passion for architecture and the old and often dilapidated great country houses of England. It sounds as if, with his love and enthusiasm and tact, he often charmed the owners (who were often old and dilapidated, too) into passing their precious family seats into the care of the Trust. But not always.

I had a horrible day with Colonel Pemberton at Pyrland Hall near Taunton. He is a fiendish old imbecile with a grotesque white moustache. When I first saw him he was pirouetting on his toes in the road. He has an inordinate opinion of himself and his own judgement…  Having hated me like poison he was nevertheless furious when I left at 4pm. I conclude he has to have a victim on whom to vent his spleen.

The last time I read these diaries must have been pre-Internet. With a a few clicks now I can bring up an image and see for myself what Lees-Milne is talking about. This is Kelmscott, the home of Arts and Crafts artist and designer William Morris.

The old, grey stone, pointed gables are first seen through the trees. The house is surrounded by a dovecote and farm buildings which are still used by a farmer. The romantic group must look exactly as it did when William Morris found it lying in the low water meadows, quiet and dreaming… The garden is divine, crammed with flowers wild and tangled, an enchanted orchard garden for there are fruit trees and a mulberry planted by Morris. All the flowers are as Pre-Raphaelite as the house, being rosemary, orange-smelling lilies,, lemon-smelling verbena. The windows outside have small pediments over them. Inside are Charles II chimneypieces, countrified by rude Renaissance scrolls at the base of the jambs.

Pediments? Jambs? Rude scrolls? Now it’s easy to find out what they are.
The diaries aren’t just about driving in unreliable cars to visit eccentric aristocrats in remote mansions.  These first volumes take in the worst days of the Blitz and he often found himself cleaning up bomb damage, watching for fires or sitting all night in a shelter. In one entry, he helped a crowd of people to make a chain of hands in order to rescue rare books from a bombed-out library. And he always found time to socialise. He was friends with all sorts of artists, writers, historians and cultured celebrities –  with literati like Nancy Mitford, Vita Sackville-West and Ivy Compton-Burnett – and a crew of glittering but now-forgotten socialites such as Emerald Cunard and Daisy Fellowes. They all seemed to manage to wine and dine and spout witticisms amongst the death and destruction.

These diaries wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste – he’s a snob, and his comments about ‘the lower orders’ are a bit hard to take – especially since I would have been one of them! But for all that, Lees-Milne’s mixture of people and places, historical and architectural knowledge, description, philosophy, religion, anecdotes, gossip, opinions, complaints, doubts and fears and failings is addictive reading. He was candid about his personal life and curious about other people’s. Often malicious or waspish, but at times surprisingly compassionate. In one entry, he’s conscience-stricken that he unintentionally “cut” a working-class fire-watching colleague, and berates himself for hurting the man’s feelings. All in all, a good companion to take on a holiday.

Ten years ago, when I met my friends, we talked about our teenage children and our ageing parents. Now we talk about our own health. Most of us have something to whinge about and it seems we all have our pet theories. It’s the gut or the adrenals or the immune system. Maybe hormones. Diet –  take your pick from sugar, dairy, wheat, gluten, animal protein. Pesticides. Pollution. Plastics.

As for me, I suppose there could be an element of all these things, but I’ve always been puzzled by the way some people get sick and others don’t. There are our genes, of course, but what about attitudes, personalities, temperaments? How we learn, think and feel. Our childhood experiences. They make us who we are, and influence how we respond to life’s challenges. In his 2003 book, When the Body Says No, Dr Gabor Mate explored the body/mind connection and the role of our emotional lives in the development of a range of diseases such as cancer, arthritis, diabetes and auto-immune diseases. In The Myth of Normal (written with his son Daniel Mate and published last year), Gabor Mate goes further and sets his sights on the tsunami of chronic disease and mental illness engulfing the Western (and Westernised) world. The subtitle is Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. It’s so obvious, it’s scary; the way we live now is making human flourishing increasingly difficult. Addictions and mental illnesses are the ways in which we adapt to our crazy culture; diseases and disorders are the ways our bodies say “no” to the perpetual cycle of stress, hurry and worry. The authors emphasise that although the suffering is personal, the causes are culture-wide. At 500 pages, it’s a bit of an epic, but wide-ranging, ambitious and illuminating.

In 1991, aged 32, I went overseas by myself for the first time. I felt both bold and scared as I headed off on my Grand Tour with a round-the-world fare. Air travel was expensive then – it cost me $4,000 (which is about $9,000 in today’s money) and you can buy a similar ticket right now for less than that. So it was, as they say a big ticket item and I was resolved to make the most of it. I’d just received a property settlement, and all cashed up, I
I planned to make use of my 6 stopovers and the full 12 months.

But in the end, I only visited Canada, the UK and France – and of the six months I was away, nearly five were spent in  Canada. Because?

Because I found I just loved Canada. Adored the place. I went from coast to coast, travelling on trains, buses and ferries, seeing more of that huge country than I’ve seen of Australia. I’ve been there three times now, and I am planning to go again sometime.
I had the great good fortune to have someone to stay with at the start of my solo adventure. David was an actor, and lived in Montreal. I scarcely knew him, but he was a good friend of my older brother. And he loved showing off his country (and he loved to drive), so we took off on lots of road trips, tootling around Quebec and the Maritimes in his beat-up and chronically unreliable van. I remember a Mohawk pow-wow, a spooky ancestral mansion set all by itself at the mouth of the mighty St Lawrence, a gannet colony on a rocky island, a thousand-strong Indian religious gathering, icy white landscapes of frozen lakes and rivers, a ceilidh in a seaside village in Nova Scotia.

But some of the best times were spent at home. In Montreal, or at his cabin at Sutton near the Vermont border in an area known as the Eastern Townships. It’s a place of many little towns and villages with English names like Hatley, Dunham, Orford and Sutton. That’s because in the late 18th century, during and after the American revolution, there was an influx of  British, Irish and Scottish Americans who remained loyal to Great Britain.

All of this is by way of introducing the crime novels of Louise Penny. Her hero (and he is indeed a hero) is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. After investigating a crime in the Eastern Township village of Three Pines, he finds himself repeatedly drawn back to the place. Me too. That’s because Three Pines is a fictional version of Sutton. It’s where Louise Penny lives. And when I read, I can see the landscape, hear the English-accented French and the French-accented English, smell the croissants and pastries at the bakery, browse in the bookshop, walk through the pine woods, gaze at the lakes and mountains, shiver in the snow, watch deer and squirrel, and keep a close watch out for bears.

Thankfully I never had to worry about murderers.

The Armand Gamache novels are not only cracking reads (there are 18 so far, and I only have 2 unread) but for me, full of nostalgic Quebec pleasures.

More at Louise Penny’s site

It starts with a can of paint.
13-year-old Rowan, helping her older sister Ash redecorate her bedroom, shifts a bookcase and finds a silver ring set with a sea-glass stone. The chance-found (or was it?) ring has the power to transport the two sisters back in time, and they find themselves at a party in 1999. Ash dances the night away, but eventually Rowan falls asleep. Rowan, on waking, returns to her present-day life…but Ash does not, and Rowan must go on a high-stakes quest back into the past to rescue her. But perplexingly, time seems to take on the ability to slip and slide and shift. Even in the present day, things are not what they should be. What has Rowan done? And how will she bring Ash back?

I’m not going to give any spoilers, but basically, all my favourite story ingredients are here. There’s mystery, history, magic and intrigue. An old house full of secrets and stories. A rescue mission needing imagination, courage and tenacity. A wise woman (I love the name Verity, of course) who can help but not intervene. All sitting on a firm foundation of family life and love.

This is beautifully written, thought-provoking junior fiction – with a twist.

A lot of reading lately, but no writing. Exactly three years after the original covid lockdown in Victoria, I finally caught the virus. That was three weeks ago, and I’m only just emerging from the illness. I have to say, it’s no fun. Aches, chills, fevers, the worst headache. I’ve still got the cough. But thanks to antivirals, promptly prescribed, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been and I am well and truly on the mend. Having seen a close family member with pneumonia in the ICU, in an induced coma on a ventilator, looking like a little broken doll, I know how bad it can be. And I feel so grateful to Medicare – imperfect though it may be. Long live socialist medicine!

My sickbed entertainment was watching gardening shows (Monty Don, I love you!), cooking shows (baking is so soothing) and British crime on my laptop. And reading, of course.

Cook books, because I didn’t feel like eating.

Crime novels, because they take me into a different world, a world of fantasy where justice is done – which cheers me up.

Georgette Heyer regency romances, cheering also, as (fantasy, as above) love conquers all.

A stack of current Vogue magazines, from my sister-in-law, which were interesting to look at…but I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t understand today’s high fashion aesthetic. Which is OK, I’m old, I’m probably not meant to. In contrast, I have some 1950’s English Vogue and these are fashions I can appreciate and understand. Impractical, mostly, and probably uncomfortable (corsets, stockings, high heels) but so elegant.

Luckily, I had borrowed a pile of books from the library just before I got ill. The literary fiction didn’t work for me.  The non-fiction went a little better, although I skimmed and skipped and therefore can’t really remember how to have a beautiful mind, the science and secrets of memory, the ultimate guide to household budgeting, and radical science fiction from 1950 to 1985. The one that really defeated me was The High Magic of Talismans and Amulets: Tradition and Craft by Claude Lecouteux. Not Now, Not Ever: Ten Years On From the Misogyny Speech, edited by Julia Gillard, had me alternately cheering and seething at how so much has changed, but not enough. Watching footage of the speech, I wondered once again how Tony Abbott ever became Prime Minister.

One book I’d like to read again was The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips. She looks at the ways in which creative women who are also mothers face the challenge of meshing the two identities of mother and artist. Her subjects are varied – writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Alice Walker and visual artists such as Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois and Barbara Hepworth. There’s a long-held idea (or prejudice) that you can’t be a mother and an artist. Both are all-consuming: something’s got to give. Women have to choose between maternity and ambition because a “real” artist needs solitude, an oasis of freedom tucked away from domestic life and especially the tasks and cares of parenthood. However, these women had the courage to stake a claim for their art –  that it mattered, that they mattered – and they devised ways of combining care with their vocations. It’s both inspiring and depressing.
And made me remember (proudly) the time when I finished a book, typing one-handed, with a newborn held in my other arm.

I guess you would call me a ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ voter, so I felt a surge of joy when the results of the last federal election were announced. I was elated, not because Anthony Albanese is some kind of visionary saviour – I confidently expect Labor to stuff up – but because the Liberals under Scott Morrison were just so awful. Cruel. Stupid. Smug. The First Dog on the Moon wrote, “Good riddance you jabbering ghouls. History will remember you as the worst of us.”
Widely published political commentator and award-winning author Niki Savva is a conservative – indeed, a former staffer to John Howard and Peter Costello – and so I imagine that makes her views on the current state of the Liberal Party all the more acute. And she does not hide her loathing for Scott Morrison. So we’re on the same page there, which makes Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s fall and Anthony Albanese’s rise irresistible. I haven’t read the other books in her political trilogy, but they are now on order from the library. So I am going to be reading backwards –  about the hideous, embarrassing Abbott rule (The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin destroyed their own government) and the disappointing Turnbull years (Plots and Prayers: Malcolm Turnbull’s demise and Scott Morrison’s ascension).

But first, Morrison. Savva starts with the election that should have turfed the Liberals out – the “Morrison miracle”. I remember spending election night in disbelief. The only thing to be glad about was that Peter Dutton wasn’t leader.
But according to Savva, even loyalists Peter Dutton and Josh Frydenberg knew that Morrison was “…a deeply flawed personality, a duplicitous, damaged leader with limited horizons and appalling judgement even they were not certain they could trust, who rarely understood what Australians expected of a prime minister.”
She goes on: “Morrison used, played and deceived them, as he had so many others, in ways that were both obvious and beyond even their imaginings. He left them with a pile of rubble, feeling wounded and betrayed… He was petty and vindictive. Few dared challenge him, worried that if they did they would bring the show down. Their reluctance ruined them, and left the Liberal Party in its sorriest state since it was founded by Robert Menzies in 1944.”

I loved this book. I gobbled it up like a box of chocolates, unable to stop because all the pleasure centres of my brain were buzzing, humming and zinging. Yes, yes, yes!
This excoriating account of Scotty from Marketing’s political demise is a thing of joy and beauty. And The First Dog on the Moon is fantastic, too.

I’ve had mixed success with Barbara Kingsolver’s books. I liked The Laguna, gave up on Prodigal Summer half-way through and bailed on the audio book of Flight Behaviour after ten minutes. But the friend who loaned me this book told me I’d love it. And I did. It’s long and sprawling, rich in characters and events and told in a voice that’s unforgettably moving and funny and tragic and real. It’s a re-telling of Dicken’s David Copperfield, and like Dickens, Kingsolver is unashamedly polemical about what poverty and abuse does to children. Is it too soon to say this is the best book I’ve read all year?

Damon Fields is born to a drug-using teenage mother in Lee County, Virginia, in the heart of the Appalachians. There’s poverty – and then there’s destitution; with Damon’s mother in and out of rehab and no family to help, he’s on his own. But he’s not. The warm and generous Peggott clan, who own the trailer Damon and his mother live in, take him under their wing and in spite of everything, his childhood is almost happy. But when his mother marries, Damon gains a merciless stepfather and his life takes a dive. As does his mother’s. Controlled and abused, she overdoses, and Damon is shunted into the care – I should write ‘care’! – of the welfare system. He becomes part of the underage labour crew of an elderly farmer, and then is used as a source of income by a fecklessly poor middle-class family. As Damon says, ‘a kid is a terrible thing to be’.

The catastrophic failings of the services and individuals meant to protect and care for children are Kingsolver’s initial targets; in the next stage of Damon’s life the American medical system comes under fire. He finds a home with Coach Winfield and his daughter Agnes – who goes by ‘Angus’ – and becomes a high school football star. He’s badly injured, and predictably, given the profit-driven nature of medicine in the US, he falls between the cracks and becomes addicted to OxyContin. I happened to have recently read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, so I was aware of the ruthless exploitation with which Perdue Pharma deliberately targeted poor communities in places like Lee County.

At the end, however, there’s happiness for Damon. Rarely for me (I don’t usually like a tome) I wished Damon Copperhead was longer.  I missed him!

There are so many adjectives I could use to praise this book – absorbing, entertaining, shocking, tear-jerking, hilarious, and more… But I think perhaps the best thing I can say is that it enlarged my heart and mind, which I guess is what reading is supposed to do.  Kingsolver’s novel is generous and attentive to a group who could be dismissed. Who often are, called called white trash or trailer trash or hillbillies. Here, in Australia, rednecks or bogans. She doesn’t shy away from ugliness, but embraces the loveable, the complex and the human.

Lately I’ve been noticing old people in ads on TV and in the media. Not what I’d call ‘properly old’ people; these actors are impersonating active retirees, perhaps in their early 70’s, to promote resort-syle living, massage machines, insurance or luxury cruises. They are usually white, slim and silver-haired, with great teeth; dressed in expensive casual clothes (linen? cashmere?), they ride bikes, stroll along beaches or gaze at the sunset together. Often, they toss their silvery heads and laugh. Ha, ha, ha. It’s such fun to be us. I guess these imaginary seniors are chortling because they’ve won the financial and genetic lottery. Attractive, healthy, wealthy ageing! Such a lovely fantasy.

For what I’d call properly old people – and by that I mean from the late 70’s on – it’s not all fun and games. My parents both died in their early 80’s, and neither had a long decline. Last year, I lost three beloved older (90, 93, 98) friends. All women, all intelligent and funny and articulate, they talked openly with me and it was a privilege to hear about their long and eventful lives. But sadly their last years were (and here’s a euphemism for you) ‘challenging’. Losing a spouse, losing independence with transport or activities of daily living. Losing bladder control. Loneliness. Falls. Loss of confidence. With increasing ill-health and frailty, having to move into care. Despite the best efforts of carers, loss of dignity. Little or no say in the daily routine. Horrible food. And being so very, very tired. Not a lot of fun, but there was still the occasional spark. We could laugh at the black humour of it all. I was moved by their bravery and stoicism. As Bette Davis said, ‘Old age ain’t no place for sissies’.

Though I gave up my short-lived career in aged care in 2021, I retain a keen interest in the topic. I am still at the strolling along the beach stage (though my hair remains stubbornly dark) but I’m on my way – as we all are.
And when I am there, I would love to have a doctor like Dr Lucy Pollock, a British geriatrician. She is realistic, warm, compassionate and totally patient-centred. She discusses the topics you’d expect –  independent living, falls, driving, dementia, capacity, drugs, treatments and interventions, end of life care, advance care plans. Enlivened by many anecdotes and stories from her years of practice, this book isn’t by any means a grim read; occasionally, it’s surprisingly funny. She writes:

This book is for anyone who is living with some of the problems my patients have. It’s for people who are getting very old, and for those who love them. It’s for all of us, who will, if we are lucky, become old. It’s about what I have learned from skilled, kind colleagues from families and from my inimitable patients, about how to ask delicate questions, and what to do with the answers, and what to do when the going gets tough – it explains what I have learned about how to be old.

Some of the content is of greater relevance to British readers, as it references the NHS and aged care in the UK, but most of it is informative, illuminating and inspiring. More than anything, Dr Lucy wants us to have those essential honest conversations about how the very old want to live, and to die.