Simon Gray is 65 and is unwell. It’s not clear from this brilliant book quite how unwell he is. At some point he had prostate cancer, he tells us. But he doesn’t say if he has it still. What he does say is that he still smokes about 65 cigarettes a day. (He started smoking at the age of seven, and the best he seems ever to have achieved by way of giving up has been to reduce this briefly to 30 a day.) He also used to drink four bottles of champagne a day, though he is now a teetotaller. I am impressed.


,img>But a lifetime of overindulgence, he tells us, has taken its toll on his health. He is fat and flabby. He spends much time ‘belching, farting, dribbling, wheezing’. And although as a schoolboy he was a star at football and cricket, the only physical pursuit he can still enjoy is swimming. What never seems to have suffered, however, is his productivity as a writer. He has written more than 35 plays for stage, radio and television, not to mention various novels and memoirs. He may feel horribly old, but who could not envy him his energy?

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