On with the mission to cure old-lady voice! I contacted Natasha Curham, a speech therapist with wide experience in helping older people. Before accepting me as a client, Natasha advised me to visit an otolaryngologist (ear nose and throat specialist) to check the physical state of my throat. Nodules? Cancer? Gastric reflux? Scarring? Let’s see whether those working parts […]
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Practising Christmas carols, 1944, Granada Relocation Center, Colorado. Tom Parker, Wikimedia At first I noticed it occasionally and brushed it aside quite tolerantly: Oops, that’s my old lady voice! You know the one I mean: squeaky, creaky, wobbly, unpredictable, on-again-off-again as if a fuse was about to blow. A voice that shuffles along in slippers. If a voice […]
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In which I admit that my commitment to accessibility is not without limits. There’s a limit to how far I’m prepared to plan ahead. Making my home safe, shareable and secure is as far as I’m willing to go at this stage. One day I may need a walker or a wheelchair. That’s on the […]
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“Have you ever paused to contemplate the idea of home?” asks Robyn Haynes in her blog, Big Dreams for a Tiny Garden. On a trip to Outback Queensland, she felt a deep connection with the land, and her sense of home expanded from house, garden and family to something much broader—Australia. (I’ve distorted her thought flow by summarising it — […]
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In which I am torn between an old age of grubby indolence (tempting) with the officious whip-cracking of a body corporate. Have you noticed a tendency of older people to stop dusting and cleaning and fixing up their homes? My sisters and I suspect that late in life our mother did zero housework. A nice helper went […]
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