Who was it who said that the first thing he turned to in the paper each day was the obituary column, to check that he had not died?
Well I haven’t got that far yet, but I am at that stage where it is sometimes a surprise to hear that someone else is dead, or was alive until very recently. Someone who was famous when you were a child, who seemed old then, so must have been dead for years. But good heavens, now they have died and they were only …
Edmund Purdom, the handsome Student Prince, stole my heart away when I saw that film. He has just died aged only 82
But Jerry Lewis, who made all those funny films with Dean Martin, is still alive, also aged 82
Then last year, Elizabeth Jane Howard published a new novel at the age of 85. I do not know how I had got it into my head that she had died – I even thought I had read the obituaries - so that came as a wonderful surprise
