Not to take anything for granted.

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

We are too often advised to live life to the fullest. That’s too much pressure. The key is to find joy and poignancy in the quiet and mundane. Life is lived between the so-called big moments.

To believe my eyes and not my ears.

'Excuse me, madam, you have a thong hanging out of your handbag.'

Cell Block Tango from the musical Chicago.

Appearing on a Paris catwalk in a beard.

Not becoming a ballerina.

An emergency landing in a snow storm in Philadelphia.

As a little bit naughty and a lot nice.