Yes, I have a sense of my childhood, I love it.

Ever since my childhood years, I'd wanted to see and experience everything a person could see and experience.

This did not, of course, happen.

On the contrary, it seemed to me, my life had been uneventful and gone by too quickly.

But it only seems like that until you start remembering.

One memory brings up another in its train, then a third and fourth.

An unbroken chain of memories takes shape.

Why did you choose this approach?

How does the world look different today?

I think my attitude to death is different.

I think that when you're 30, 40, 50, 60, even 70 probably, death looks like an event in the distant future.

It looks like something that you're sure you'll handle with a certain grace and perhaps even panache when the time comes.

When you get to the age I'm at now, the age I wrote this book at, You don't feel quite so casual about it, I suppose.

It's really very close and very present, and so I've had to think through it.

My partner, Peter, is quite a militant atheist, always has been, and I suspect always will be, although you never know, do you? He says, unless you accept the fact that that you will die and there's nothing else to come.

And yet you seem to me to be one of the most gregarious of men.

The dance of ideas, the dance of feeling, living life as a dance seems to me to be something that you have articulated better than anyone else I can think of.

Well, you've just made me happy because the word tango is the really important word for me.

I'm hopeless at the tango.

I've tried to learn to tango.

It is too difficult.

But what is good about the tango is that it's playful.

but it's also disciplined.

You come across as someone at ease in the world and I'm curious that you feel that you're not.