Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

 From the Elderescence Podcast Beauty After Perfection: Decay, Dignity, and the Digital Gaze Digital culture has trained us to worship the unmarked surface. Smooth skin. Even light. Correct proportions. Endless optimisation. For years, technology promised refinement — better resolution, sharper focus, cleaner edits. The logic was simple: beauty was something to be perfected, preserved, and defended against time. And yet, something curious is happening. As artificial intelligence becomes more capable of rendering faces, bodies, and futures, it has also begun to reveal something we were never meant to see so clearly: what happens after perfection fails . Ageing is no longer hidden behind soft focus. Decay is no longer off-screen. Digital tools now generate wrinkles, sag, opacity, greying — not as metaphor, but as data. And instead of feeling grotesque, it often feels… honest. There is dignity in this honesty. For a long time, decay was treated as an error. A flaw in the sy...

 From the Elderescence Podcast AI, Time Compression, and the Return of Death to Consciousness I didn’t expect artificial intelligence to make me think about death. At least, not like this. I expected spectacle — novelty, cleverness, perhaps even menace. What I didn’t expect was the way AI would make time itself visible , and in doing so, quietly remove one of modern life’s most effective illusions: that death is distant, abstract, and safely postponed. AI has a peculiar ability to compress time. To accelerate it. To render decades as seconds. Faces age. Bodies change. Futures appear without narrative, without explanation, without sentiment. There is no story arc. No tragedy. No triumph. Just time, applied. And that is what makes it so confronting. We have lived for a long time inside a culture that disguises ageing. Youth is endlessly extended, death politely hidden, decline edited out of the frame. Even old photographs allow us a degree of emotional distance — they are ot...

“This is part of my Elderescence work on ageing, pleasure, health, and embodied confidence in later life.” Pleasure in Later Years: Sensuality, Desire, and the Art of Elderescence Ch 1  Why Older Bodies Need Pleasure, Not Punishment For much of adult life, the body is treated as a project: something to be improved, corrected, disciplined into compliance. Effort is praised when it hurts, restraint when it denies, endurance when it overrides discomfort. Pleasure, by contrast, is treated as indulgent, suspicious, or earned only after sufficient suffering. This moral framing of the body is rarely questioned until age makes its consequences unavoidable. As we grow older, the body does not simply weaken; it becomes less willing to cooperate with force. What once responded to pressure now responds to tone. What once tolerated strain begins to ask for care. This is not failure but intelligence. The ageing body does not rebel — it negotiates. Punishment stops working because the nervous ...

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🍏 Or find this episode on Apple Podcasts comedy noir, female detective, audiobook short story 🎧 Listen now  on Spreaker  📖 Audiobook available click image   Ginny Greaves: The Case of the Disappearing Demeanour The man had the kind of face you wanted to slap, not hard necessarily, just repeatedly. He stood in Ginny’s office doorway with a limp hat in his hand and an expression that suggested he'd just been accused of something, and was considering whether or not to own it. "Hey, lady, You're Ginny Greaves?" he asked, in a tone that implied he had expected someone smaller, more feminine, and perhaps with fewer cigarette burns on the desk. Ginny didn't look up from her crossword. “Depends who’s asking and whether they pay on time.” He stepped into the light like a man auditioning unexpectedly for a role he didn't understand. His name was Preston Tibb, and Ginny took an instant dislike to him, possibly because he used the word “lady ” within thirty seconds o...