Diary – 20 September 2018

The Hastingses have idyllic lives but, like most seventysomethings, we find ourselves in ever-closer proximity to mortality. We hold season tickets for hospital and care-home visits, funerals and memorial services. Prostates are a staple of dinner-party conversation. We have not got quite as far as the 94-year-old contemporary of the painter Raoul Millais, who quavered in the churchyard after the two had bidden farewell to a friend: ‘Hardly worth you and I going home from here, is it, Raoul?’ But we are mindful of La Rochefoucauld’s observation that compassion represents the intelligent anticipation of one’s own troubles to come. When my old friend Christopher Bland was diagnosed with the cancer which eventually killed him, my wife Penny, who has had her own experiences of that hateful malady, remarked sensibly that none of us is going to get out of this alive. Christopher agreed with me that if either of us, aged 21, had been handed pen and paper and told of all the good things we would have in our lives, in return merely for agreeing to say sayonara at 79, we would have signed without blinking.