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Worrying about the future
Frederic Raphael Writer
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Beetle and I, were going to go to Chicago – my birth city – because somebody invited me to go and be on a panel in Chicago, talking about film, and they were going to pay the passage and all the rest of it. We then discovered it was going to cost, like, £2000 pounds to insure ourselves for six days to go to Chicago, in case we had a heart attack and all the rest of it. So we... we're not... we're not going. It's a bit wet but it's also fairly prudent. Anyway, my general experience of life now is, don't make dates so far ahead that you think the day will never come because it just may be that it will. And when it does, you'll find you've agreed to go to Newcastle. So, on the whole, I now try to say no to people if I can, unless they will come to my house in which case I'm a soft... fairly soft touch as long as it's not in the morning because in the morning Casals and I do our stuff.

Do I dread death? I would like to say I dread my death more... less than I dread, certainly Beetle's death. I don't know what either of us will do without the other. I suspect that she will survive without me and I'm sure that I would, God forbid, survive without her. But it wouldn't be much of a life. Perhaps we'll both be killed in the same plane, car, stuffy room or anything else, I don't know. But depend upon it, it's very unlikely that what would be nice will happen. Something... as Cavafy said, you should not lie awake at night worrying about the terrible things that are going to happen. Almost certainly they will not happen. Something worse will happen.

Born in America in 1931, Frederic Raphael is a writer who moved to England as a boy. He was educated at Charterhouse School and was a Major Scholar in Classics at St John's College, Cambridge. His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and The Sunday Times. He has published more than twenty novels, the best-known being the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes (1976). In 1965 Raphael won an Oscar for the screenplay for the movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. In 1999, he published Eyes Wide Open, a memoir of his collaboration with the director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final movie. Raphael lives in France and England and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964.

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.

Tags: death, accident, solitude, future

Duration: 1 minute, 40 seconds

Date story recorded: March 2014

Date story went live: 10 September 2014