But what lies beneath?

David Bowie and Madonna are past masters at it. The media call it reinventing yourself and it involves taking on a new persona, drastically altering the way you look and dress and maybe even having surgical procedures done too, so that you can re-present yourself as a new product to a new market.

For most of us non celebs, this is only something we read about in 3am, or similar publications that we browse in the doctors waiting room: perish the thought that any of us would admit to buying such puerile trash. You see, for the most part we adopt a hair style and choose the type of clothing we feel we look best in while we are still in our early teens and, apart from gaining weight,wrinkles and grey hair, we remain largely unchanged, appearance wise, till the day we die.

When my grandfather went to work at around 14 he wore his first suite, a style of clothing he then wore everyday till he died. At a similar age I, and my generation, adopted jeans, sneakers and t-shirts as our national costume and, whilst it is not something I wear everyday, it's still my default dress code setting. When todays 14 year olds become grandparents they will still have scruffy hair, ware a hoody and pants that carry the crutch at knee level and are weighted down by chunky silver chains.

But what lies beneath? Is it just external appearances that are important, or need we look deeper?

With this being the first year of my seventh decade I've been using my changed circumstances (retirement, relocating back to NZ after seven years, becoming grandad, rather than dad etc, etc), to look beneath. To try and see objectively, if I can, who I am and how I fit into the space I (and others) have unthinkingly moulded for me over the past 60 years. To have, if you will, an internal makeover and possibly discard some things that no longer serve me well, perhaps even take on some that are more in keping with my current neads? But what's inside is far harder to identify honestly and objectively, and still harder to alter than either my hair style (if I had any left) or the type of clothing I choose to wear.

So, whilst this process has unearthed more questions, at this stage, than answers, it has made me hugely aware of the influence I will have on the development of Sujin's world view, her values and her attitudes and maybe, understanding this will be key to my own internal make-over.

Anyone for charades?