Losing the people that I love.

Becoming invisible.

I’ve been very fortunate in that respect. In the early days I liked to be the bomb of the expedition, and rush on ahead and do things faster than anybody else. Those days merged very pleasantly into periods when I organized and inspired expeditions and selected these younger people who were then the bombs of the operation. And then it drifted into this involvement with the people of the area, still loving the mountains, but finding the people just as important too. And on and on it’s gone. As I get older and less physically capable, I find other challenges have grown up and become just as important to me.

It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

Nineteen Eighty-Four. I always meant to read it before 1984, and once 1984 had passed I didn’t see the point.

Fizzy like lemonade.

Giving barium enemas. I used to be a radiographer in Coventry.

An umbilical cord.

I don’t have children. I will leave my nieces money because girls need money of their own. Anything to make women independent.

I was called the N-word in Romford, by someone stepping off a train as I was getting on.