When I'm Sixty Four

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,

Who could ask for more?

Will you still need me, will you still feed me,

When I'm sixty-four?

I was sixteen when this was released on the Sgt Peppers album and at that age I could not imagine even being as old as 20. But, the unimaginable has happened! I'm 64. My young husband (who will not be 64 until 2015) decided on the spur of the moment to have some of the neighbourhood around for dinner to help me celebrate and so it was that the entire song - above is verse 5 - was sung to me last Saturday, with David on euphonium. I just hope in 20 years I will be living life as fully as some of them still are - such as Anna, the other side of 80, who breeds dogs and still rides her horse and gets in trouble for driving too fast and regards French champagne as the only worthwhile party beverage. Or Helen, professional musician and Vic who are still stalwarts of the Labor movement, with a history of activism including dropping everything to get arrested in Tasmania over the Franklin Dam. Or Bruce and Elaine, both 70, who casually built a house earlier this year for their daughter and son in law on their property in Gilgandra.

(Below) This is me having a cup of tea in bed after opening my parcels. Do I feel spoilt? Yes.

Jenny and Tim our beautiful friends next door arrived for a coffee mid morning, with these friands, still warm from the oven. Crisp, light, tender, moist inside. Mmm.

Its Jacaranda season and they are everywhere you look. This one was behind the garden of Bent on Food Cafe in Wingham, where we went for an excellent lunch. I'm wearing the cashmere shrug/cardigan that Lian gave me. So warm, so soft. We also had a poke around in one of Wingham's range of specialty shops, this one called Delinquent Funk, selling "alluring retro wares".

After lunch, a little bushwalk in Wingham Brush, a remnant piece of rainforest that was somehow saved from the timber getters in the 19th C and retrieved back from its burden of killer introduced weeds in the 20th C. So now we can enjoy its peace and birds and huge trees like this strangler fig.

Brush turkey scratching around on his enormous compost mound. They incubate their eggs inside the mound and out hatch little fluffy chicks like this one (below)

Wingham Brush is well worth a visit.

(Below), strange fruits in the stinging trees, way up high.

 

Which turn out to be flying foxes. Hundreds of them. Squabbling and flapping and making quite a racket. At dusk they all fly out en masse to pillage fruit trees in the surrounding district.

Final birthday treat was a visit to the Manning Regional Art Gallery where the local art prize, this year named Naked and Nude is currently on exhibition. It featured a recently rediscovered Norman Lindsey original oil that is in the possession of the NSW Police having been confiscated many years ago and then apparently, forgotten. There was a plan at one stage for the Diamond Beach Art Commune to enter this competition and preparatory photo studies were made of your blogger and her artist husband in a state of being "naked" and "nude". It was to be named After Larter as a nod to famous painter Richard Larter who often portrayed his wife Pat, dressed in nothing but a gap toothed smile. But we lost our bottle, sad to say.

This is lady who didn't lose her bottle and it was my favourite picture of the exhibition. It's by Wendy Sharpe of Erskineville, NSW. Got a spare $20,000? It didn't have a red dot.

So, a lovely birthday. Thanks for helping me celebrate. It's better to have reached 64 than not, absolutely.