The Time of Your Life: Getting on with Getting on - Tapa blanda

"It's a law of script writing that scenes get shorter and the action speeds up towards the end. In childhood, the afternoons spread out for years. For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons. The playwright Christopher Fry, now ninety-three, told me that after the age of eighty, you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes. These film scenes, building to an inevitable climax, tend less to tragedy than farce. Dying is a matter of slapstick and prat falls. The ageing process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.

Ageing is that part of the future that we try to keep in the future. And 'nobody likes to get old...that doesn't mean to say you have to be an old fart sitting in the pub talking about what happened in the 1960s' Mick Jagger. John Burningham has collected fine examples of the wisdom and wit that comes with age from those in the know, woven with a rich selection of quotes and fifty poignant drawings by Burningham himself.