When I say that I am ‘a child of the Depression’, most folk know what I mean. It tells them that I do not waste anything if I can help it; I buy hardly anything if I can do without it; and I get great satisfaction out of tastefully using left-overs that are in my...

I cannot quite understand it. Here is this woman, 86 years old, very capable, well educated and articulate, good company and in good health, but who is flying to Switzerland next week to have herself euthanised. No, I don ‘t quite get it. Now, I know she says she has...

My little grand-daughter had a tonsillectomy last week. She has recovered well. It reminded me of my own experience when I was five. After contracting the dreaded diphtheria when I was three (read about it in my book ‘ Gardening in Your Nineties’), I suffered from...

One thing always leads to another. One of the many interviews that I have done has lead to a learned fellow coming up to do a podcast about ageing, with me, the nonagenarian, doing the talking! He thought it was very good, and a week or so later I received a request...

What a difference a few decades make! When I was a growing girl in the city, our doctor lived a few streets away. He practiced from home, and would make a lot of house calls; needs must, because in those days just prior to WWII, there would be only one car to a...

The Hollywood Theatre once stood proudly on the corner of Logan and Chatsworth Roads in Greenslopes. Every Saturday morning in 1938 I would take my sixpence (five cents) to attend the tap-dancing class that was held at the back of the stage. I was ten. There was a...

I have a granddaughter who has ataxia, a form of cerebral palsy. She has a weakness in her hands, her tongue muscle and in the muscles of one leg. This means she cannot run, her fingers will not grasp smaller objects and her speech is sometimes hard to understand. She...

It was during the Great Depression, when money was in short supply, that the collector would visit weekly to pick up a small amount of cash toward the sum that was owed. The two young boys who were sitting at the top of the outside stairs glimpsed the gas man...

 During the last war, my parents befriended two American soldiers, brothers from Idaho. We became very fond of them and were devastated when the younger one lost his life in the fierce fighting in New Guinea. I wrote to his mother until she died and vowed to visit the...

How I love reading of the old days in the Tamborine Bulletin! Not only does it inform me; it sometimes takes me back to my childhood at Buccan and my school days at Logan Village. This time, I was transported to the one-teacher school where headmaster Mr Alec Brown...