This week I’m going to the Hay-on-Way literary festival to take part in a discussion following the showing of a documentary made for BBC4 by Charlie Russell. It’s called The Last Year of my Life. Mine, that is. It was filmed over the past three years, and began because I mentioned that my parents, my grandparents and my aunts all died at the age of 71. I said I wouldn’t last much longer. Obviously I feature throughout, cigarette mostly in hand, and once seen falling over at a Foyles ‘do’, but that, I protest, was because my lovely friend Bernice Rubens had died the day before. It’s a very good film. Charlie Russell is my grandson.
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One day last week I opened something called a Flower and Angel Festival at St Pancras parish church near Euston. It’s the one up on a hill with the railway running behind. Father Bruce Batstone showed me round its beautiful interior and its dazzling displays of heavenly flowers.
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