Lorna Brown teaches creative dance

Early in my mother's marriage she started going to classes in creative dance held in a room in Otago University in the Physical Education Department. They were taken by someone called Lorna Brown. There were about a dozen people in the class, and they danced to a variety of records including Spanish stuff requiring castanets, shawls and a shuffling mastery of footwork.

When I was a kid one of my toys was a pair of black plastic castanets held together with a piece of red string. Of course I didn't know what they were or how to operate them. They seemed a very cryptic children's toy. Funny how your parents' lives before you were born don't exist when you are a child or a teenager. When you are a teenager you are utterly impervious to the idea that your parents were once young, and felt the things you felt and hated the things you hated.

Then you get older of course. Age does bring perspective. Strangely this reminds me of a piece I read in a book at the beginning of the year. The person writing is a very old Jesuit priest, and he says:

"I am sometimes very conscious that I am following a leader who died when He was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Evedrybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him. Very well, am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man? All Christ's teaching is put forward with the dogmatism, the certainty, and the strength of youth: I need something that takes account of the accretion of experience, the sense of paradox and ambiguity that comes with years."

Although my father lived to a reasonable age he died when I was five. It struck me this year that I really knew nothing about him. Am I taller than him? What did his voice sound like? All those photos of my mother and me... he was there, in the room, holding the camera and pushing the button. I really think he must have loved the woman he married. He supported her in the barbarian culture of 1960s Otago to take fashion courses, to do a Masters, to dance.

This interest in dance, and the weekly dance classes, leads to what is for me the iconic album in the collection.