Old people, or at least older people, people like me, have a certain sheaf of things we tend to bang on about: the ignorance and ingratitude of the young, the decline in standards, reading, spelling, manners, culture in general, and so on. If we write books we are sometimes faced with the problem of what happens to a piece of writing (a novel perhaps) when it becomes a piece of seeing (a film or a television series). Of course you can always say no, but that doesn’t seem to happen often because of vanity, natural curiosity and (of course) money,…