My debt to Serge Gainsbourg

At 105, William Frankland is probably the world’s oldest working doctor. In his long and extraordinary career, he has counted Saddam Hussein among his patients (it was in 1979, and he probably saved his life, by persuading him to quit smoking), and worked with Sir Alexander Fleming. His own research, into allergies, has benefited millions worldwide (and formed the basis of the pollen count). But it wasn’t people that got him into medicine. “People say you must have wanted to help human beings, but it never came into my mind,” he told David Wilkes in the Daily Mail. When he was a child, he and his siblings fell ill, and the doctor couldn’t work out what was wrong. At that time, he was an avid reader of detective stories. He realised then that illness is also a mystery. “I think being a doctor is like being a detective: someone is sick and there is something you have to discover that’s not obvious.” Life hasn’t been easy for Jane Birkin recently, says Nina Myskow in The Times. Three years ago, her oldest daughter, Kate, died in a fall from a window of her Paris flat, aged 46. She was a photographer whose work had appeared in Vogue, but she was troubled. The coroner recorded an open verdict. At the same time, Birkin herself was battling leukaemia. Last year, there was a breakthrough: she no longer has to have thrice-weekly blood transfusions; but cortisone made her fat. “I looked vast,” she says. “It gives you an enormous neck. I looked like a bulldog. I didn’t like it, but at the same time I didn’t care. And antidepressants make you eat.” She grins ruefully. “Maybe one day I’ll wear a bikini again, but it’s been many years. You have to hide your tummy, and then there are the legs – the vast, vast bolster legs.” She’d rather not look at herself any more. “I’m happier when I don’t.” Birkin doesn’t expect to make any more films, and after Kate’s death, she couldn’t even bring herself to sing. “But eventually I realised I’ve been given a second chance.” Now, she has a new album out, of songs written by Serge Gainsbourg, her long-term partner. They split up before he died, in 1991, but they remained very close – and he never stopped writing for her. “I’m grateful to him that he’s found me a way out, a way to get back in the world. By going back to Serge, he is helping me move forward.”