Fragments Sound Reel 1

The Late Fragments podcast features conversations with elderly individuals about taboo topics like sex, money, politics, and religion. The host, Chloe Fox, discusses how money motivates her and the importance of using wealth for positive social impact. She also talks about the value of love in life and the need to love something or someone. The podcast touches on personal experiences, including a lie about a hotel bill and the realization that everyone faces death alone. The host hopes for a dignified and graceful end. I'm Chloe Fox and this is the Late Fragments podcast in which I talk to remarkable octogenarians and some nonagenarians about the four topics of conversation that should apparently be avoided in polite company. Sex, money, politics and religion, they are the things people want to talk about. Is money something that you've valued in your life, does it motivate you? I'm not sure completely how much it motivates me. For example, I won't do anything with Piers Morgan and he offered me a large sum of money. You on the other hand I don't think have offered me anything and I'm doing it because I want to. I really need to make sure that the life that was saved was worth saving so I enjoy my wealth, I try to use it in a socially positive way. Poverty of income, poverty of earning, poverty of sufficiency makes for poverty of expectation, poverty of aspiration. Nothing changes, just because you're old. So I'm a great advocate for geriatric love, I mean it would be. This last journey, I borrowed a mobile phone once or twice to reassure my wife that I was still alive but really at about three week intervals perhaps, it was a bit rough on her but she understands that need, she says think about the journey, don't think about me, think about the journey. Someone is either sexy or they're not, and who the hell knows what it is, I mean if you could sell it in a bottle it would sell well. I said do you remember that holiday we took in Devon and he said we were in love and I said yes. Before I drove away I said can I do anything for you and he said I'd like a transistor radio. I didn't think about politics in my writing in a very indirect way, I wasn't in the mainstream of the kind of plays which were being written and that's not a choice of course, you are what you write and you write what you are. One particularly true thing was said which is I had told a lie about a hotel bill. I was caught lying and I paid a heavy price for that. At the end of the day what really matters in this life, love, and it doesn't have to be love of your husband or love of your children, but you have to love something, it could be I don't know, rare orchids or your spaniel, if you really love something or someone it makes you happier and makes everybody around you happier. I think the cliched question you can put is where was God at Auschwitz? So then they say well he gave human beings the right to self-determination but I said by doing that God must have known that we could use that right to self-determination in a nasty way. All I can tell you is almost any idea you have you'll almost certainly think something else as you move through life so I just haven't learned absolutely nothing from being here I don't think except I did have a good time. I think one of the reasons people dread the end is that there's no one who can help you towards it really, you just have to help yourself. Everybody realises at the last moment you're by yourself and in my case not meeting my maker but ending a life I've absolutely adored really even though it was full of pain and suffering and misbehaviour. It's the one thing that we can all be sure of, Boris Johnson as well as me, we will die. I hope I do it with dignity, I hope I do it gracefully, I hope that all my bodily fluids are under control. Thank you for listening to the Late Fragments podcast, until next time, goodbye.