dear nice lady who I like
perching on your mauve mat
waiting for Bruno  
to buck up our bodies 
and plait them with Pilates

thank you for your advice
to change the word on my tee shirt 
from 'old' to 'young' because
we were learning (surely)
how to be young

I didn't roll my eyes
but silently I muttered
let the young be young
with all their troubles
let them at least have that

plus I have been young already
I don't need to study at young-school
but I've never been old before
and, nice lady, 
we have a lot to learn

Instant poem by Rachel McAlpine

Methuselah

Everyone knows it’s best to be young
for the young are beautiful by default
and the young are perfectly divine
and old is the ultimate insult.
Even a three-year-old knows how 
to crush a woman in power.

And so when Mim, our grandmother
popped our little sister on the old tea trolley
away from the Hoover and fun fun fun
Penny bellowed, “You are 
an extremely old woman
and you look like one!”

But the curse was powerless, and worse:
Mim laughed and ever after
signed her letters, “Yours, Methuselah.”
She found the label of “extremely old”
to be incongruous and comical 
and true.

by Rachel McAlpine, from How To Be Old (Cuba Press, 2020)

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I'm allowed to change my name.
I don't like names 
that get older.

I'll have each name for two weeks
so my other name
gets new and clean again.

Maybe I'll be Elsie Mabel
Elsie Mabel
Elsie

~ Words from the mouth of Elsie, arranged by Rachel McAlpine

And here’s a drawing by Celia McAlpine (pretending to be a much younger artist.)

Hard to believe? No harder than the saccharine visual distortions of reality that interrupt what I’m reading on Substack. Image designed by means pretend photo rustled up by AI under instructions from.

These images are even less lifelike than the real photos of handsome wealthy 50-year-old models with whitened hair baring their perfect teeth in ecstasy over a glass of wine, those photos of pretend old people that have bombarded us in magazines and ads and billboards. They were posing as our dream future selves, but at least we knew they were posing. And they were human, just Photoshopped, not designed to order.

I assume that advertisers expect us to admire these pixels so smoothly arranged on our screen and to aspire to their lifestyle. Fair enough, that’s their job.

But on we go. Now some of my most admired writers whose authenticity I do not doubt are popping those AI images into their work. I’m trying to read but these weird imaginary people in technicolor with sunlight dappling the loverly trees in the background, they keep butting in to my thought processes. Strange noises clog up my throat. Aaarghkkkkkk.

It’s getting to be an existential tic. If a reader groans alone and nobody hears, does the reader even exist? I should groan louder or groan on the phone. But I am alone. Does nobody care?

Now, irritating AI art work and real words from someone I like very much and believe to be real. Next minute, or nek minnit as we say in Aotearoa, what?

I know I’ve gone too far when I slide into the ‘if caps go’ train of thought. Immortalised for me when I lived in Masterton, and there was a hint that a conservative boys school might (gasp) no longer require their students to wear caps. Cap wearing survived the debate, on the basis that If caps go, the entire school would slide down a slippery slope into a chaos of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. And enrolments would drop along with repuration.

That’s good. It’s good to blurt. To go too far. In a safe place.

But does it matter? Yes. Is it funny? Yes, it’s both funny-peculiar and funny-haha. I’m watching this space.

Preparing for old age is scary
scarier than getting pregnant 
twenty thousand miles from home.
Now my body has to face 
the prospect of extreme old age.
What scares me most is the unknown
and so I study hard. But hey

old age is not like pregnancy.
I’m carrying a void
and when I say I’m getting old,
nobody says to me, “How lovely! 
Congratulations! 
Is this your first old age? 
When is it due?” 

Oh no, they tell me:
“You’re not old.
You’ll never be old.
I’ve never met anyone less old than you.
It’s all in the mind.
Age is just a number.
Try homeopathy.”

~rachel mcalpine (from How To Be Old, Cuba Press, 2020)

Hello, you

If you hate the thought of living past 90 
if you worry about your ageing parents 
if you work with very old people
or if you are simply rather old like me
we have things in common.

If we live a long and even healthy life
our body, brain and spirit will be challenged
every day. We need company.
We need sensible survivors
who know what it’s like to be 90 plus.
Courage is infectious. 
We can’t do this alone.

Thank you for standing up for me
on the bus.
I'm 100 per cent
of my current 
personal 
100 per cent
 re-engineered
adjusted
mellowed and moulded
and not moribund

but even so
I am inclined to wobble
on the bus.

~ rachel mcalpine 2026

If you know someone who is curious but only half-interested in podcasts, and you want them to try a particular podcast (not necessarily mine) feel free to share the video or audio version of this little talk. That might help, and someone will thank you, I hope.

By the way, podcasts are terrific for older people. We grew up pre-TV, with radio in our ears.

Transcript of What’s a podcast?

Hey, I’m Rachel McAlpine and my podcast is Learning How To Be Old. Listen if you might be old one day.

I said listen, not watch. People ask me, what’s a podcast? What’s the point? There’s no video, nothing to see!

So. It’s like a radio programme on your phone. But you pick the programmes that you really like, and listen whenever you like. No screen involved. You can listen while you do the dishes, sit on the bus, go on the treadmill, drift off to sleep — whatever.

And it’s on your phone. Which is in your pocket. If you’re 50, 60, 70, you’ve got a friend in your pocket. Just search for Rachel McAlpine podcast, or Learning How to be old. Or my website, WriteIntoLife.com/podcast. There’s a pile of episodes there for your pleasure, and a new one every couple of weeks.

I labelled that drawing (above) ‘The perfect week’ but that’s wrong. Perfection is something to aspire to, something I could almost imagine getting close to if I actually wanted to. I could diminish the extreme desert between me and it, crawling towards perfection inch by inch under a brutalising sun. Which I never have done, never will, —but theoretically, it’s possible. And I don’t care.

The ideal week, on the other hand, is an arcane alchemical hypothetical concept. If I ever achieve it, I won’t tell a soul. I certainly won’t tell you because you can’t keep a secret and before I can say Jack Robinson, the whole world sneaks into my week with a bulge, my week with an extra Thursday. You would use it to schedule meetings and trains and bang goes my burgeoning blossoming bunion of a secret Thursday.

I wish I’d never told you even this much.

Never mind. It’s Saturday, sunny, with butterflies, Cyclone Valaano is not due for about 29 hours and I’m done here.

Maybe next week…

I’m thinking about war between dahlias and snails
and the noisiness of lettuce
and the indestructibility of doilies
thinking about the corkscrew penis of a duck
and the dizzying velocity of its sperm

I’m not thinking about Trump

I’m thinking about the hem
of my black and blue pants
I’m thinking about the verses in my head
and how they nestled in a clump
I’m thinking about fingers
that massage and tickle and drum
and pat
I’m not thinking about that

Thinking about the colours
of grazes and bruises
on children, the wetness
of weeping and blood

Thinking about the book that won’t be written
and tiny tomatoes on the windowsill

I’m not thinking about Trump

Thinking about my friends with cancer
and swimming and kittens
and patriotic semiotics
and peripatetic nemeses
and the masculine hegemony
and am I going to sneeze

Thinking about anything but Trump

— Rachel McAlpine

I am so sick of certain tired, thrashed-to-death 21^st century style cliché headlines.

First someone noticed that headlines with certain structures got more results than most. Then they listed the (5! 7! 10! 12!) winning formulae. Then other people started using them and using them and using them until I could scream.

For example, I groan when this sentence structure pops up on my screen.

What nobody told you about <something>.

Whiny, skity, and presumptuous, it bores and offends an overthinker like me. How am I supposed to react? Like this, or this, or this, or what?

• Waa waa waa, nobody told me, how mean, I could have been rich and famous, poor me—?

• Gee whizz, you’re a genius, how did you know—?

• Oh wow, finally, I’m in the club—?

• You’re wrong: I figured that out for myself years ago—?

• What makes you think I care?

Here’s a second ubiquitous example:

<Something> is not <whatever>. It’s <whatever>.

It sounds like this to my ears: ‘You stupid stupid reader. This is so incredibly simple, a binary choice, and still you get it wrong.’

Yeah yeah, I know. Many of these writers go on to make interesting points, but too late. I’ve left the room, if not the building. All because of a headline that was supposed to draw me in.

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A small thing gave me great delight this morning: cat litter.

My cat litter system is a masterpiece of efficiency, recycling of newspapers and secure shredding of confidential documents. (Not original, of course.) Newspaper to absorb the pee, shredded paper to give Ursula something to scratch and toss around.

There’s always pleasure in physically shredding old bank statements, transcripts and manuscript drafts. My old hands can do this very satisfactorily. I like the whoofy sound of ripping paper. The vicious satisfaction of destroying. The righteous satisfaction of recycling. The housewifely satisfaction of a small daily task ticked off an imaginary list.

In summer, the strips themselves are stiff and broad. They tend to fall off in long irregular quadrilaterals rather than strips. They work, they do their thing, but are vaguely frustrating. I suppress this feeling because it’s quite unfair to the paper.

But now it’s autumn and everything changes. Damp air has permeated Ursula’s ensuite bathroom and ripping paper is a whole new thing. The paper is slightly damp so it curls! The curls tremble and dance like living things. The paper even separates in layers, shredding in three dimensions. My cat litter becomes a thing of beauty, a truth, a joy not forever but at least for this moment.

“Small things amuse small minds” was one of those sayings in the 1940s-50s, i.e. the olden days when I was a child and teenager. It might be said as a joke but essentially this is a snarky sarky put-down.

Curly cat litter is indeed a small and transitory thing. But it’s funny and pretty and strange and wonderful. Let’s not belittle our pleasure in little things: that is cruel and crazy. Let’s roll the joy around and make a meal of it. If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

Small things amuse my mind. Proud of it.

Why do you stereotype
your future selves, the old?
Because we’re slow.
It’s true, we know it.
Our speech is slow
as we search for the word we want
or another word that would do.

We’re slow at walking
slow at pulling on our shoes.
You hurry us but no
we must be slow or else
we lose our wallets or return
to double-check the stove.

Slow is all the rage—
unless it’s our adagio
enraging you, you
who are so desperate to go
you who have been ranked from birth
on how quick you were
to crawl and walk and talk
and smile and be right.

But now you frown.
You rank us low and know
you’ll never be that slow
unless you join the crowd who now
aspire to go slow
learning from books and blogs
all about slow travel

slow cooking slow thinking
slow ageing slow knowing.
Excuse me please.
Here we are
right under your nose
teaching by example
the esoteric Way of Slow.

You are tourists in our land.
We are the prisoners of slow.
That said, we’d rather be quick than slow
and we’d rather be slow than dead.

~Rachel McAlpine (From ‘How To Be Old’, Cuba Press)

Maybe share with your friends? I love when you do that!

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The Crows Feet Dance group has started working on a new dance with the theme of RUSHING. Interesting word, ‘rush’. It’s more than hurrying, it’s a kind of urgent, almost out-of-control hurrying, as if you must achieve something immediately or suffer dire consequences. It’s hurrying with an anxious tinge.

Here’s (more or less) what I emailed yesterday to our lovely choreographer, Anna Groves.

RUSHING

I reckon your theme of rushing has got all of us looking at our lives. You asked us to improvise movements based on everyday actions when we’re rushing. I had to fudge this because … at 86 I very rarely rush at anything.

A few of my friends say the same. Some for the same reasons as me, some because of physical imperatives. One learned from her partner, a man who did not rush, could not rush, yet was always on time, got there without fuss or frenzy.

I’m only speaking for myself, but other heads may be nodding here. We may hurry, but that’s different. At such moments we consciously and deliberately go fast. Like right now I am typing every thought that comes into my head flat out. That’s on purpose and that’s nice. Not a problem, standing safely at my desk. We know better, most of the time, than to rush. We don’t often have the urge to rush: no kids to get off to school, no job.

Speaking for myself, the cost of rushing is too high, so I allow an inordinate amount of time to get to appointments and meetings etc. Also, times and dates are now weirdly tangled up in my mind.

In old age the relentless challenge is to do almost everything mindfully, fully focused on the task. This is a huge change — something I tried to do once or twice a day for my mental health is now mandatory, even sometimes a matter of life and death. In middle age, we aim for mindful moments. Stop before you start. Stop before you eat or drink, do the 3 sighs, when you walk just walk, and so on.

The 5-Minute Meditator (by Eric Harrison, out of print) has been one of my manuals for life, but if tested I’d have scored a D at best. Most of the time as we go through our ‘one wild and precious life*’ we are thinking about practical matters, family, plans, problems, grudges, tasks, work, ideas, and what to have for dinner.

Not-there-ism is the norm, mindfulness a delicious aberration. For example, my son the retired doctor says he would be mindful while entering another room and when taking blood pressure. Just a few minutes in the day. That’s enough to reset your body and mind.

When you’re old, you are distractible, your short-term memory is shot, and everything happens slowly. Being fully aware and paying attention is no longer a frill. Our autopilot has skived off.

Which makes mindfulness not only much more difficult but also 100 percent necessary.

If only we could really stick to this! It’s a constant challenge. Two weeks ago I ran for a bus and fell over, grazing my hands and knees. Three days later I caught myself again running for a bus, and stopped: because there’s always another bus. On the other hand we desperately need to let our minds wander, to daydream. That needs to be scheduled for when we’re safely sitting down or in bed.

Being old is like a new job, a rather demanding one at that. Luckily we do get paid :)

PS Exhausted Grandparents, the painting: if you’re a grandparent you sure know that feeling. The painting is by my sister, Lesley Evans. She’s pretty slack about publicising her new work but don’t worry, she is still painting away merrily in her 80s, in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Shortly she and her husband Richard Evans will feature in my podcast, Learning How to Be Old, in an episode on gardening in later life.

(You know someone who needs this reminder. So please share.)

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By 60, everyone is eccentric.
This one plays with Japanese dolls.
That one recycles her tissues.

This one plays his new CDs
on a home-made crystal set.
That one talks to her table.

You can fool them when you're young
but when you're all grown up
and you know what you like — why bother?

Here’s one for my sister Prue’s 60th birthday. I don’t think it had a title…

Your trouble, my friend,
is too much fun.
And there should be 
a lot more of it.

Doctor, doctor, look at my left hand.

It’s a hand.

Yes but what’s the diagnosis? I want a diagnosis (that I like).

Oh, that. You have osteoarthritis, a stereomimosa cyst, bromeliad bunker syndrome, stricken sumo thumb, recalcitrant stensoritis, palmar fiddliatosis, weak muscles and something else.

OMG it’s the body apocalypse! But why? why?

Sigh. (Looks at watch. Hands over 27 pamphlets.)

But why me?

I don’t know. But (hint) these are common age-related conditions.

How can that be? I’m only 86! How is that old?

That’s old.

Give me a pill, no, eight pills!

Is the hand painful?

Actually no.

Is the hand making daily life difficult for you?

Very difficult indeed. Opening a Vegemite jar, replacing batteries, model making and doing overhead presses. All tricky now.

You’re doing exceptionally well. Your life is good. Let’s send you to a hand therapist. They will help you and you will also help yourself.

Thank you for the diagnosis. That changes everything.

(Not.)

It happened yesterday when I was waiting at the traffic lights. I looked unusually odd, even for me. The day was warm and drizzly and sure to get colder. What we laughingly refer to as ‘summer’ was almost over, but this year we haven’t had a summer. Random summer days, sure, but the weather had been rainy and windy and sometimes terrifying and generally even more unpredictable than usual in our darling Wellington. I had even worn my gumboots, known as Wellingtons in certain faraway places.

So I decided to wear my only pair of shorts, in an effort to persuade Huey the weather god to lighten up. It’s a funny thing. I believe the shorts look terrific on me, even knowing perfectly well that I look ridiculous. I know that because I saw a photo of myself and saw my legs as knobbly as an oldie timie walking stick and speckled like a thrush’s throat.

Standing with me at the slowest traffic lights in the southern hemisphere was another old woman brazenly displaying her knees, shins and calves. Her leg skin was frayed and bleeding in small bits, and a large white dressing covered the worst of it. We had a profound conversation about legs and old age, and all the while she had a glint in her eye and she clutched my arm very strongly with one very strong hand. Note the double use of ‘very’: I mean it.

It wasn’t a menacing grip. Not even an Ancient Mariner grip. Just a ‘here we are, two old women who know stuff and want our legs to feel the air’ grip. We bonded.

The lights changed. She let me go. And off we went into the cool grey drizzly air, flaunting our legs. After all, if you’ve got them, flaunt them! And if not now, when?

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O no, I said, walking out the door. We can keep talking. There’s no wind right now.

I crossed the street and the phone cut out. I looked at the thing in my hand. It was the hand piece of my vintage cordless phone. Had to happen one day!

So I kept walking, because for Film Society even the grand Embassy cinema fills up fast.

Safely settled in one of the last seats, 25 minutes early and three rows from the back, I made futile attempts to find a secret button that would turn the hand piece off. Heaven forbid that it should ring during Picnic at Hanging Rock. That would be most unlikely as

• only three people, two businesses and random scammers ever use my landline

• we (my phone and I) were well out of range.

Then by chance I hit a button that made the damn thing ring. Only 15 minutes until start time now. This was getting serious. I’d have to disconnect the battery, which meant simultaneously pressing and sliding a stuck lid out of its slot. This task was beyond the capacity of my 86-year-old thumbs.

A nice couple including a man with big strong thumbs sat beside me. I had told them the story and finally their hilarity had subsided to a level where they could breathe and talk at the same time so that he, the man with the big strong thumbs, could liberate and decouple the battery, and close that ill-fitting recalcitrant plastic lid.

And so the film began, two hours of slow, mystifying, sensuous enchantment. And my phone stayed silent.

Why do I keep my obsolete landline? Inertia, and attachment to stories of how crucial they were during the Christchurch earthquakes, when cellphones died.

You don’t want a fuss. Then you wish there was a fuss. If you wanted a fuss, why did you say you didn’t want a fuss?

What are you doing for your birthday today, Rachel? Oh a swim and a coffee with my darling friends. Then gym. And choir tonight as usual. Anyway we had a family lunch last week with a cake and candles and all, so it kind of happened then.

This morning a whopping big new thought hit me: now that I’m 86, I could say, ‘In four years I will be 90.’ Suddenly we’re getting serious. I’m already old, I know that. I think of 90 as the time when I will qualify as extremely old.

I rushed to interrogate my computer about the meaning of 86, because surely it must have other, more elevated implications. Belly punch:

verb: 86

1. eject or bar (someone) from a restaurant, bar, etc.

   “they were accused of cheating, and eighty-sixed from their favourite casino”

2. reject, discard, or cancel.

   “the passwords will be 86ed by next October”

But my birthday will turn out beautifully anyway. It always does. I will report back.