What’s on my mind: Rose Tremain

Starry infatuation: 21%
I’ve scripted a movie called The Housekeeper, which starts shooting this month, starring Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter, Caitriona Balfe and Emma Laird. I’m already in love with all these people and spend a huge amount of time imagining how fantastic they’re going to be once the cameras start rolling. The film is so enthralling, I worry that I won’t be able to return to “normal novel writing” after it’s over.

Zelensky’s socks: 19%
Global news is more terrifying than at any time in my long life. I make myself read the papers and watch The World Today, but I’ve had to build a homely kind of heat-shield round my brain to keep it from burning up with fear. My favourite bit of the shield is a dream that I’m hosting President Zelensky and his sympathetic wife, Olena, for tea in my kitchen. We don’t talk about lost people and bombed cities. We don’t mention the word Putin. We eat coffee cake and crack jokes. Zelensky dries his snow-soaked socks on my Aga.

Medical misadventure: 10%
There is a world-wide shortage of a drug called Creon 25000. I need to take 49 capsules of Creon per week, after surviving surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2019. Now, trips to the local pharmacy are fraught with fear. Will I get my Creon allocation or be sent away to make numberless calls to other chemists?

Where has all the laughter gone? 7%
Why are TV ads so screamingly pink and so pathetically trite? How much are advertisers paying for this dismal candy floss? In the old days, ads told stories and made you laugh. Remember Hamlet cigars and Smash robots and all the hilarious Foster’s lager sagas? And, oh yes, the witty “Water in Majorca” Heineken ad made by my brother-in-law, Adrian Holmes? Nothing to chuckle at now, alas.

Royal housing: 13%
How many palaces should the King own? I thought it was five (Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, Balmoral, Highgrove) and now I learn it’s at least 15. I was just about OK with five – for the sad prince who loves trees and lacked a tender mother – but I find I am very upset by 15. King Charles III is the monarch of a country suffering every known variant of homelessness. Come on, sir. Please do something.

Doing the dying: 14%
At 82, I think about death most days. It’s not the eternal non-being that frightens me, but what Martin Amis called “doing the dying”. I did a bit of practice dying in Addenbrooke’s Hospital in 2019 and am still haunted by memories of pain, sickness and hallucinatory states. Amis, who died in 2023 from throat cancer, once suggested that “euthanasia booths” be available in public parks, an idea my protagonist Marianne rather favours after suffering heartbreak in my recent novel, Absolutely and Forever. We give our pets painless deaths at times of our choosing. Why not us?

Angus Wilson’s tears: 11%
I remember my grandfather once telling me, a child of six or seven, that all his friends were dead and I wondered what he could possibly mean. Now, memories of the departed seem to order me to keep conjuring them up: my nan, Vera Sturt, buying cherries from a London barrow boy and holding my hand all the way to school; Angus Wilson breaking down in tears over the fate of Mrs Marmeladov in a UEA seminar on Crime and Punishment; Malcolm Bradbury waving his hands about at one of his epic dinner parties, at which he was always a course behind because he talked so incessantly; my South African friend Carol Reunert laughing at our ski instructor’s rule to keep our “tits to the valley”; my darling editor, Penny Hoare, ordering herring and schnapps on a fabled research trip to Denmark… Add to these all of the lost places; places where I once lived, restaurants I used to love, walks I used to know by heart, and life can feel strangely diminished.

Trains of thought: 5%
There are also the small irritations: the damaged knee which is slow to heal, the tech breakdowns we seniors can’t begin to solve, our subjection to everyday annoying words and phrases that are like mosquito bites to the sane mind. The worst of these might possibly be the “See it, say it, sorted” ungrammatical idiocy used on the train network. And it’s an empty promise. I “saw” a theft at Liverpool Street Station, I “said” it to the police. It was never “sorted”. But hey, there are surprising wonders, too. Recently, my train to Norwich stopped in the middle of the Suffolk countryside and I saw in the distance a road that I used to take regularly during my first marriage. The relationship ended in tears long ago, but all I could recall now were its moments of love and happiness.