… Celia was one of the few women I knew who was very like herself. She was more like herself than I was like myself. She did not try to please anyone and certainly did not fit patriarchy's idea of what an old woman should be like: patient, self-sacrificing, servicing everyone's needs, pretending to be cheerful when she felt suicidal. If old women are supposed to not want to cause any trouble, Celia had decided to cause as much trouble as possible.

The trouble was how to live a creative life in old age.

The son of a friend of Celia's was living in the attic of her big house. In return for free accommodation, he was doing some of the caring along with the official carer. Sometimes it became too much for him, so with Celia's permission he invited his best pal from Manchester to help out. These two young men, both of them students in their mid-twenties, kept the house cheerful, put up with Celia's volatile moods, cooked imaginative meals, played music that everyone enjoyed, and as anyone who has been in this caring situation will know, they had tremendous responsibilities to handle while they studied for their academic degrees.

Sometimes when I arrived to listen to Celia read from The Hearing Trumpet, one of  the boys would be marinating a leg of lamp in something weird, like sultanas and balsamic vinegar, to which Celia, quoting from The Hearing Trumpet, remarked: 'I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway.'

It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves …