After a lifetime's independence– yes, selfish independence as my daughter would rightly claim – I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals.

Things don't matter, people do

Christmas works like glue, it keeps us all sticking together.

I am not afraid of death, which after all can't be far away. What does frighten me, though, is the halfway stage.

I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

Is nothing in life ever straight and clear, the way children see it?