Some readers may have seen the re-runs, on BBC-TV recently, of the ‘Face to Face’ interviews done by John Freeman in the 1960s. One of these was with the singer Adam Faith, then a startlingly beautiful young man with the grace to be amazed at being chosen to be sandwiched between Martin Luther King and (if I remember aright) J. K. Galbraith. The re-runs were accompanied, where possible, with a further interview with the same person. What I found almost as startling as his lost beauty was Faith's referring to himself-when-young in the third person. After watching the rerun interview, the now middle-aged man commented to Freeman, on several occasions, that ‘He said such-and-such’, ‘He told you so-and-so’, and the like.

This curious self-distancing was presumably based partly in a lack of memory. It would be amazing if one remembered much of what one had said in an interview twenty-five years ago, and Faith clearly did not. But cognitive—emotional distancing may have been involved, too. On a couple of occasions, Faith remarked either that he disagreed with what ‘he’ had said then, or that he could not fathom why ‘he’ had said it. The marked physical differences between the younger and older personae, and their very different life-styles, may have contributed also.