[Q] Have you got anything to say about old age? I mean…

No, the only thing I have to say about old age is that this is one of the things that seems to happen, or it has happened to me, is that while I was sort of sparklingly sociable in the early days when I was in the theatre… I… it seems to be associated with getting older, not because I feel myself feeble or disabled by old age at the moment, I have a bad back and I can’t walk around quite so much as I used to, but I’m perfectly healthy, but I don’t have any particular feeling about the arithmetic sum of my years, as if it’s getting on top of me and anything like that.

I’m nearer to death, I suppose, and all I have... I have anxieties only about what will happen when I get ill enough to be disabled and perhaps in pain and wish to end it.  But otherwise I have no feelings about old age at all. I feel myself to be very much the same person that I was when I was younger. I mean, my interests are the same and I, you know, go on reading the same sort of stuff and get as interested in a certain range of things as I was when I was, say, 30 or 40 years younger, so I don’t feel age as such means very much to me.