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.

Nothing. I’m curious how things will evolve.

The inability to do things for myself.

I was looking at ageing in action, in black-and-white MRI pixels, death and dissolution foretold, and already partly achieved. My 70-year-old brain was shrunken and withered, a worn and sad version of what it once must have been. There were also ominous white spots in the white matter, signs of ischaemic damage, small-vessel disease, known in the trade as white matter hyperintensities – there are various names for them. They looked like some evil pox. Not to put too fine a point on it, my brain is starting to rot. I am starting to rot. It is the writing on the wall, a deadline.

I would tell myself to stop being such a worrier.

Selfless and open, freeing.

I can be a people-pleaser, to the detriment of my own needs sometimes.

Sensitive, kind, silly.

Nothing’s guaranteed and things change in an instant, and to get used to that and stay in the moment.

Cruelty to animals or children.