​It's a Monday at the Classic Comedy Club in mid-town Auckland. It's the night when beginner comedians gather to test their comedic talents in front of a live audience.

Comedy Director, Geoffrey Scott Blanks, who was made an Officer of the NZ Order of Merit for his services to comedy in the last Queen’s Birthday Honours is busy selling tickets to the 2-hour “Raw” show in the club’s bustling foyer.

​At 8pm the doors to the high-ceilinged performance space swing open. A friendly usher directs us to seats clustered around tables, cabaret-style. Candles flicker on each table. The red brick walls are hung with posters advertising comedy shows past and present. There are a few grey heads in the audience, but it’s a youngish crowd and the atmosphere is warm and convivial. 

I'm on my own so I’m pleased to be seated at a table with four other women with whom it’s easy to strike up a conversation.  It turns out they aren’t just here for laughs - they have skin in the game. The young woman on my left, has Nihilist printed on her T-shirt and Hysterical Feminist on her tote bag. She's here to suss out the comedy scene before making a leap from sit-down wannabe, to stand-up comedian. ​

​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.

​The book lust was upon me and a book token was burning a hole in my pocket when I visited Page and Blackmore’s bookshop last Saturday. It turned out to be New Zealand Bookshop Day and all kinds of celebratory bookish entertainments were on offer including tea and toast and random giveaways.

I like random give-aways as much as the next woman, but I really had to do something about the smoke spiralling from the back pocket of my jeans so I ignored the beverages - and the possibility of a freebie  - to browse the tables of appetisingly displayed books right away.

Unfortunately, a recent change in my contract Fairfax Media means I can no longer post my Grey Urbanist columns on this blog until 3 months after their publication in the Nelson Mail. 

However, you can read the rest of this column here on the Nelson Mail website.

A friend recently lent me a collection of Spectator columns written in the 1980’s by English novelist Alice Thomas Ellis. They were still very funny and I polished them off in a sitting. 

However the columnist in me was awfully envious of the raw material Alice had at her disposal. She had a publisher husband who was also a brilliant Oxford classicist, many children, a house in London (plus boa constrictor), a house in Wales, a faithful family retainer and lots of weather of the sleet and snow variety. She also had cigarettes, booze and Catholicism and was mates with Kingsley Amis, Oliver Sacks, Iris Murdoch, and Beryl Bainbridge (more of whom later).

All I’ve got is one ex-husband, one child, a small flat in Nelson (plus Fox Terrier), a benign climate and atheism. Not a faithful family retainer anywhere. A lesser person might have sunk into rue and envy of Alice’s literary life in London but an examination of my own small life soon turned up something uniquely mine. Poor Alice probably had to rely on black cabs and the Tube to get around. But I have a scooter.

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:

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.