If I have plotted Square Space's next date, it's going to say February 21. If I'm wrong, or if it's wrong, then I'll have to rethink. I'm not getting any younger....

GOTCHA. Back atcha. Soon.

NOW:

I've done a lot of research about ageing, still doing it, of course; it's an ongoing process. It's generally conceded that there are three stages to ageing: 1) young old age, between the ages of 55 and 65; 2) middle old age, between 65 and 75; 3) old age, from 75 to 85. After that it's old old age, 85 and on and on and on and it's uncharted territory. Mind you, It's getting charted now as more people are living into the twilight zone. I read that there are more people over the age of 65 living today than in all of the past recorded history. Ten years ago, it was difficult to find a birthday card for an eighty-year-old. Last week I counted four cards for a ninety-year-old. I'm happy to tell you that age cards are no longer scatological or sexually rueful, and they've stopped the cutesy "90 years young" approach.

I've written a book about ageing, a combination exploration and travelogue because life is a journey - one of the common metaphors - taking us all, sooner or later, to the "undiscovered country from which no traveller returns." It is NOT a self-help book, though I've had publishers think it is because they haven't read it. I've been type-cast by the influence of my best-selling book, the one I wrote after my husband died. (Beginnings :A Book for Widows, Key Porter Books, 1976). I finished this new one (Endings: A Book for Almost Everyone) two years ago and have not found a publisher. While I was still writing it, I read Roger Angell's delightful essay in The New Yorker, "This Old Man", and wrote an introduction to my book - "This Old Woman" - as an explication of my approach but also as a kind of rebuttal to his; men and women grow older in different ways and with different attitudes. Now it has been so long since I finished writing that if - when - my book sells, I'm going to have to write an epilogue: "This Older Woman". As long as we keep living we keep changing, learning and growing. Yeah, yeah, I know: we ripen like good cheese and we mature like fine wine.

Did I mention that I'm eighty-seven years old?

I'm learning how to make tea. And not only that.

Some time last fall I read about how bad tea bags are for flavour, health and environment, and I thought that's one more small way I can help the planet. (Ugh. That sounds so holier than thou.) Anyway, I have a couple of friends who really know about tea. So I had them for brunch and they gave me some excellent, fresh, authentic tea (leaves, that is) and showed me how to make it, pinching enough (two fingers and a thumb) to make tea for three. Later, I had to figure out how much less to pinch for one. I've been experimenting and I'm getting better at it and also liking it better. For someone who has been accustomed to tea bags as the normal, it has been an adjustment for me, more than i anticipated, and it's a nuisance - inconvenient, you might say. I would.

Then, just this past week, I read an essay on convenience and the subtle ways it has undermined our approach to life. Tea bags are just a tiny part of it. Remember all those "Popular Science" short movies about the inventions of the future that would give us so much more leisure and so much more time to be creative? Well, you may not remember those movies (they were blue and orange, I think, in the days of black and white) but however young you are, you'll remember all the rosy predictions of the future. All the conveniences predicted have come true and then some. There isn't anything you do today that isn't easier, simpler and less effortful than it used to be. Even the first wonder inventions required effort - like cranking up a car to start it, like walking across the room to change channels on the television. No more. You can start the car now without even going near it. And you can adjust sound or brightness with the remote, and repeat or record (and stream, which Is called binge-ing and which I call pigging-out).

Years ago I listened to a conversation my cousin was having with her mother, my aunt. Auntie Anna - she was the only aunt I called Auntie - about laundry. Anna thought Margaret worked too hard, washing every day, keeping everything so clean before it had a chance to get dirty. In her day, Anna said, one towel per person did all week until the Saturday night bath and that finished it off. That may sound hard to believe but remember that a few centuries ago, the washing was done (if at all) every six or twelve months, that is, in large households. (Penelope Fitzgerald starts her novel, The Blue Flower, with this major project.)

When washing machines were invented, people had to be persuaded to buy them. Soap, too. Thus, Madison Avenue. Frequent washing - and bathing - became necessary to keep the economy growing. How convenient is convenience when it becomes a duty, a chore and a hardship? Convenience leads to monopoly. It's a matter of scale.

I know, I know, I'm getting carried away and I could say a lot more and will, I'm sure, at some later date when my battery and I are not so tired. All because I've switched to leaf tea. it's very good, by the way.