Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith,

literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Joan Bakewell.

His new book is called The Tick of Two Clocks, A Tale of Moving On, and it describes her,

well it describes a house move, but a very significant one. Joan, welcome.

Can you tell me first of all about the title, a tick of two clocks, the tick of two clocks? It's very difficult, isn't it, finding a title for a book.

I think it's a wonderful game and this came from a Seamus Heaney poem in North, the volume North,

and it's a poem written to his mother.

It's called Sunlight. And it's a tribute to her. He wrote a lot of poems about his life with his

family, his mother baking in the kitchen and this is what she's doing. And she's making some,

she's got a flower on her hands and I sympathise with a lot of the detail

because Seamus gets the detail exactly right. And I was rather fond of the idea of two

rates of time, the tick of two clocks. One, the old house when I was, you know, lively and

rushing around family, friends, lots going on.

And the new clock, which is a much lower, lower key life, which is my retirement, or my, not

so much retirement, because I'm working very hard, but my moving towards the end of my life.

Yes, you're a very unretired person.

I mean, this is a book about the autumnal years of life, but, I mean, you know,

you're a working peer, you're still a writer, still a broadcaster.

I mean, do you think your account of old age and the movement into it is a representative one for people?

No, but it's one that I'm trying to work out to do well.

I'm always struggling to do well, and it's a good idea to shape up to old age in a positive way.

So I'm not just letting my life flow on but getting a bit less. I'm trying to make

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