Hugh Massingberd

'We might go straight into lunch.

'I don't know if it is a sign of old age,' wrote P. G. Wodehouse in the mid-1950s, 'but I find I hate Christmas more every year.' Another marked change that the Master noticed in 'the senile Wodehouse' was that he no longer had the party spirit and preferred to stay at home with a good book. Both these observations are quoted in a pleasantly discursive set of reflections on old age, The Time of Your Life, compiled and illustrated by John Burningham (Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 288, ISBN 0747560854), which would certainly tempt one not to venture out. The principal themes are how quickly time passes for the old (as Christopher Fry remarked, 'After the age of 80 you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes') and the relief of not having to worry about what others think.

'What-ho,' says an Excess sub-editor appreciatively as Simon Balcairn files his sensational account of Margot Metroland's party for the American revivalist Mrs Melrose Ape in Vile Bodies by Sir Cecil Beaton's pin-sticking prep-school contemporary, Evelyn Waugh (variously described in these diaries as 'my old arch enemy' and 'that swine'). Another 'sub' remarks that Lord Balcairn's copy is coming through 'hot and strong, as nice as mother makes it'. Beaton may have been the 'self-created' Harrovian grandson of a blacksmith rather than an 8th earl, like Balcairn, but these diaries from the 1970s, the last decade of Sir Cecil's life, are certainly 'hot and strong' enough to cause a stir even in a publishing season dominated by diaries of one sort or another.

Of all my heroes whom I have been fortunate enough to encounter in the flesh, none was more friendly and relaxed than Peter Cook. Unlike some previously worshipped from afar, he was completely lacking in self-importance and had an almost puppyish desire to amuse - as well as a generous readiness to be amused. As he wove surreal fantasies about odd items he had spotted in the pile of newspapers he was clutching or cheerfully elaborated upon snippets he had picked up from watching trashy daytime television programmes, Cook still - not long before his death in 1995 - seemed more like an unaffected undergraduate than 'The Comic Legend Gone to Seed' as he was by then idly categorised in popular mythology.

During my brief stint as a showbiz scribe - which unfortunately came to an end when I expressed a preference for profiling Gerald Harper rather than Jean-Claude Van Damme - I had the privilege of interviewing George Baker (celebrated as Chief Inspector Wexford in ITV's The Ruth Rendell Mysteries), whom I had admired since his days as a clean-cut, young officer in British films of the Fifties. What struck me most about this unusually tall actor was his impeccable courtesy. I arrived disgracefully late for our lunch in Soho, and we were then pestered by one of the neighbourhood topers, but Baker's beautiful manners were a humbling object lesson in good behaviour.