I really hate paper work. I've already told you some of my problems with officialdom, and I am grateful, complicated as it makes my life, that I/we are so protected by these barriers, even when they balk us. Ai me.

But that's surface. The undercurrent I'm working on is the final approach to my rewrite of my book on aging - mine. As you know by this time I'm a glass half-full person, looking on the bright side, hoping for the best. But I'm going deeper than I have done and I have to think harder about what I'm doing, what I'm saying. I'm not that smart, A lot more brilliant minds than I have tackled the end of life. What can I add to or subtract from what they have said?

Glass half-full, that's ridiculous, as if there were going to be a happy ending now or later. Define happy, though. Who wants to be immortal?

See, I'm approaching the Departure Lounge on this journey of life I'm dealing with and I have to come up with a boarding pass. Sorry, that's smart ass, pursuing a meaningless metaphor.

I'll keep thinking.

I've had a book since 1987 (first published in 1985), that I keep meaning to do something with. It causes ripples in my mind every time I pick it up and some ripples are close to waves. Have you heard of The Book of Questions? (Workman Publishing, New York) It's by Gregory Stock who has a Ph.D. in biophysics, which doesn't explain the kind of questions he poses.

He warns that his questions are not like Trivial Pursuit. They have no easy answers, and no right or wrong for simple scoring, They are designed, instead, to trigger thinking and conversation and more thinking. Stock says they are about "your values, your beliefs, and your life: love, money, sex, integrity generosity, pride and death..." Is that all? You don't have to keep them to yourself. You can start a conversation, preferably with a trusted friend, by asking one or more of the questions. Be prepared for some surprises, though, at least I think so. I've only got as far as me. I can pick the book up and open it at any page and get carried away into a conversation with myself.

Over the years I've owned the book and puzzled over it - no, the puzzle is in me - I find that my increasing age has reworked the questions in my mind and produced some different answers. In some cases the way I have lived my life provides answers, probably not that well thought out, but lived.

I have to tell you that as a playwright and story-teller, I find that some of the questions are worth a play or a movie, in fact, you'll probably recognize some of them as having already been written. If I can't make you think every once in a while with what I'm writing, then do me a favour and go find the Book of Questions.