​This week as I turn 65 I take possession of a Super Gold Card. From now on,  and as for as long as the country can afford it, nearly $400 will arrive in my bank account every week. ​I don’t have to do anything to earn it or to deserve it.
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Superannuation is mine as of right, simply because I am lucky enough to be a New Zealand citizen and I’ve survived to the age of 65. Although I have been marking the months off my calendar for at least six months, this fact still seems so unlikely and preposterous, that I can hardly believe it. What a miracle! What a blessing! 

​In my fifties, when the stresses of a well-paid corporate job literally made me sick, I made the decision to become self-employed. In so doing, I left what economist Guy Standing from the University of London, terms the “salariat”, the class which, for the moment at least, enjoys stable, high-income, full-time employment, to join the class which doesn’t.  This class, is what Standling calls the “precariat”, whose working lives are characterised by unpredictability and insecurity. 

​I had never heard of Standling’s theory back when I walked away from my corporate job, but it didn’t take me long to recognise that I had exchanged one kind of stress for another. I had swapped the life-sapping stress of a secure job - dress codes, senseless policies, endless meetings, unrealistic performance targets, an office bully - for the stresses of financial insecurity. It’s not a choice I regret, although when freelance writing work dried up for a while and I scrambled to find alternative employment, the days of a regular, predictable pay packet, sick leave and paid holidays, shimmered in memory like a long-lost Eldorado.

​I’ve been walking around this week with two and a half thousand dollars tucked behind each ear and no one’s noticed except me. Which is something of a relief: I’ve been trialling a pair of hearing aids. Their invisibility has made it easier for the vain and foolish part of to accept that I am wearing these twin badges of age and disability. 
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Naturally, I’d much rather be wearing diamonds as big as the Ritz in my ears. Or if I must wear expensive hi-tech gadgetry, I’d prefer that it was something way cooler and more youthful - the latest Apple Watch perhaps - than a hearing aid. Self-conscious idiocy aside, the effect of wearing hearing aids has been more positive, and more radical than I could have imagined. 

In part, bodies have been on my mind because I have been observing my own body as it responds to a dietary experiment I have been conducting upon it. In a month it has grown lighter, pain from a long-standing inflammatory condition has all but disappeared, and so have the fluctuations in my mood and energy levels. It has been good to feel so well, to experience the plasticity and responsiveness of my body even though it is no longer young.

I have also been thinking about bodies because I have been looking through “Visible: 60 Women at 60”, a book of photographs of New Zealand women who are all the same age as I am. Wellington photographer, Jenny O’Connor who took the photographs and published the book earlier this year, is at the Arts Festival in Nelson this month to give a Workshop and to talk at the Page and Blackmore bookshop about the process of transforming creative ideas into a tangible outcomes. 

On the eve of her own sixtieth birthday O’Connor discovered that 1952, the year of her birth, was also the year with the highest birth rate in New Zealand’s history. She began to wonder how other women of her cohort felt about turning sixty. Her way of finding out was to invite sixty women, all aged sixty, to have their photographs taken with whatever clothing and props they desired.

Taken collectively the photographs are a portrait of a generation of New Zealand women who are daughters and sisters, wives, lovers and mothers but are also rescue workers, scientists, political activists, mountain climbers and artists. This generation, O’Connor says, “have done things that other generations of women have never done”.

The photographs are also of striking portraits of different quite individual women. They are of all physical types and cultural backgrounds and dressed in everything from body paint to Lycra, from hi-viz jacket to top hat and tails. Some wear hardly anything at all. Amongst the tools and talismans they have been photographed with are musical instruments, maps, bolts of cloth, flowers, a wheelchair, golf clubs and a jewelled skull.  

Valerie Smith who has “a rather odd disability” (her description) is perched on a high stool in pillbox hat and fur stole. She looks as pert and as elegant as the bone china tea cup she has in her hand. Jennifer Shand, stands hands on hips, in jodhpurs and suede knee-length riding boots. Sue Bradford wears a lumber jack shirt and jeans. Taape O’Reilly brandishes a mere. Wendi Wicks appears as enigmatic as the yellow-eyed black cat she holds in her arms, while Julia Bracegirdle is a one-breasted Amazon astride her bicycle. All of the women are strikingly visible in both a physical and psychological sense.  

It is common for women to feel less and less visible as their bodies age. I know a woman of a certain age who claims - only half-jokingly – that she is now so perfectly invisible that even automatic doors fail to register her existence. 

Sadly, many women have an ambiguous and not altogether happy relationship with their bodies. They feel uneasy when their body is the subject of attention, especially the often unforgiving male gaze of the camera. For many women, therefore, becoming invisible is a relief and a liberation. 

With the photographs in this book Jenny O’Connor has managed to give women a different kind of visibility, to become visible on their own terms. Being photographed for the book was certainly a liberating experience for me, and I suspect for all of Jenny’s other subjects. 

What made the experience so wonderful? Well, firstly, the eye gazing through the camera’s eye was female. The body behind the camera, and the body in front of it, had the shared experience of living sixty years in a female body with all its waxing and waning ambiguities.

Secondly, Jenny managed to create in her studio - a plain wood-floored space containing just cameras, lights and a blank backdrop and a box of dress-ups -  a safely theatrical atmosphere in which the private and inchoate and unexpressed rose effortlessly to the surface and could then be made visible on film.

This thinking about bodies – the joys and the pains of this vehicle in which we spend our lives – 
brings to mind a poem by U.S. poet Jane Kenyon:

Death was robbed of his sting by the speedy arrival of an ambulance, the attentions of skilled and doctors and nurses, and the rapid application of modern pharmaceuticals and medical technique.

Not entirely coincidentally, I have been reading an arcane piece of literature called “Touching on Deaths” I uncovered at the Founders Book Fair. It’s a medical history of early Auckland based on the first 384 inquests held in the city. Its author, New Zealand doctor turned historian, Laurie Gluckman, spent ten years transcribing reports - hand-written in spidery pen and ink - of all the inquests held between 1841 and 1864. 

Heart attack was recorded as the cause of death in twenty of the 384 inquests. Before succumbing, victims complained of “unpleasant sensations” or “uneasiness in the chest” and one 25-year-old was so agitated by the pain that observers at first thought he was ”in the throes of a nightmare”. One Charles Trainor, suffering a headache and “something pulsating under the collar-bone” did not even bother to call for a doctor. Nor did he avail himself of over-the-counter remedies like “Holloway’s Pills - The Greatest Cure of any in the Globe” or “Dr Simpson’s Infallible Worm Lozenges”. Instead he attempted to ease his discomfort by bathing his feet, then “lay down, stretched out his right arm and died immediately” of “a rupture of the large blood vessel near the heart”.

My friend would most definitely be dead now if he had suffered his heart attack in Auckland in the decades covered by these inquests: medical attention would have come slowly on foot or by horse, if at all; many doctors of the period had only the most rudimentary of medical training; analysis of blood or urine was by sight or smell (or occasionally taste, in the case of urine); the causes and transmission of disease and infection were imperfectly understood; the stethoscope, ophthalmoscope and thermometer were very recent inventions.  Even the accurate measurement of the pulse was unusual before pocket watches became cheaply available in the 1860’s.

I woke up bright and early on Sunday morning full of energy and plans for the day. I wish I could tell you that my plans included ending world poverty and finding a solution to global warming but I have to confess that my plans were much more prosaic and self-centred. 
I thought I’d begin by painting the kitchen cupboards and then do a bit more work on my Bridge on the River Kwai bamboo garden trellis project. After that, I thought I’d do a spot of vacuum cleaning.
 It was when I found myself relishing the prospect of bathing the dog, dear reader, that I realised something was terribly amiss.

It’s the morning after the night before. I've woken with a hangover and the weather is awful. The summer sky is a sullen grey and a mean wind is tormenting the trees outside my window. 

Luckily my hangover is of the utterly pleasant kind: instead of nausea and headache I’m feeling an unusual equanimity about life, and all I'm suffering is a severe case of goodwill towards my fellow human beings. 

There’s a fortune to be made if someone can just figure out how to manufacture and bottle this sweet feeling of harmony and connectedness.