Ageing (February)

Trinity College Squash Courts: knocked down. St Moritz Ice Rink: arson. The CRA in Collins Street: once Melbourne’s tallest building, now cute nostalgia. Carlton Brewery: downed. Allen’s Lolly Factory: swallowed up. Festival Hall: slated for flattening. Lost buildings teach us ageing. Same wherever. It’s a salutary game, this February, remembering them, moving spaciously through them, even as they are gone, while living with others one never expected. Federation Square: as a critic wrote, a stack of crumpled Gucci bags. The apartment tower rising above the hospitals on Heidelberg, like those in Caulfield, Doncaster, South Yarra: sign of things to come. 

Ageing (July)

The numbers (50,60) mean the same as at 20, only you’re not 20. At parties, on PT, there are as many younger as older people. You are ‘older people’. The young rave up. It’s like America on 4th July, free enthusiasm, but you wouldn’t talk quite their way anymore. Ageing’s in the body, that’s when you’re 60: nice, slow, life is beginning. You listen to Motown, or Mozart, and it’s not old, it’s just more then. And it’s now. Only ever one health scare: that’s a fortune. Own it. You think more of those you loved, and those you love.