Ageism seems to me almost indistinguishable from racism, a point that couldn't be made clearer than he makes himself: old people are "like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops". That's what racists say about anybody with a different skin colour or an alien headdress: "They stink." True, there is such a thing as a smell of death. I know it all too well – I nursed my husband through a long and terrible illness – and very ill people of any age tend to stink of it, young ones as well as old ones. But people that are sick, no matter what their age, aren't eating out in restaurants and cafes or buying tufted carpets at Habitat.
 

Ageists also tend to say the old are stupid. Here's Amis again: "Talent dies before the body." But what about the poet John Keats or the cellist Jacqueline du Pré? Their bodies gave out way before their talents. In my own field there are and have been many prose writers writing well past their 70s and into their 80s, some of whom have had a falling away of their talent, but many of whom, like one of Amis's heroes, Philip Roth, now 76, come roaring back. Lots of people go through bad periods at all kinds of ages. Lots of elderly writers are very productive and at the peak of form: PD James (89) and Ruth Rendell (79) come to mind at once.

Which brings me to the question: Should people be allowed to work when they're older? Of course they should. It's idiotic to pension off people just because of age. True, some people do need pensioning off. Some of them need it at 40, some at 50. Some should never have been employed at all. And some should definitely be kept on at 70 or 80, especially now with the old skills in decline: writing readable sentences, manipulating basic ­mathematics, everyday diplomacy in interpersonal relationships.

It's health that matters, not age. What people are capable of at any age depends partly on that and partly on luck. Some aren't ever good at anything. Some lose their capacity early. Some don't. But everybody who lives gets old.

I remember Shirley MacLaine on the box talking to an interviewer about it. "You think it's not going to happen to you," she said, shaking her finger at the grinning younger man in the chair opposite her. "You just wait. It is going to happen." He didn't believe her. But by now, he's probably as old as Amis. I'm not saying it's pleasant to get old, to sense the edge coming closer, to know the body is weaker, the energy levels lower. But that's true of many athletes who have to retire at 30, crippled with arthritis. And many of the very old remain fit and well.

To get personal about it, I've just turned 70, and my new book is a thriller called Venom, not exactly an old lady's kind of thing. I wrote it under difficult circumstances. I have a hereditary heart condition that flared up and called for major surgery. That was two years ago and I feel stronger than ever. I do Pilates and I box to keep fit and, to tell you the truth, my writing is better as a result.

One of God's nastiest tricks is that often people don't realise they're getting old. My brother-in-law caught sight of an ancient man in a shop window and thought, "Jesus, look at that poor old fool". Then he realised that old man was himself. And here's Amis, talking like a callow teenager, who sees the old as a smelly, ugly invasion, blissfully unaware that he's already one of them.
 
 
Online, The Guardian ran the following article:

 
The novelist Joan Brady has accused her fellow writer Martin Amis of "flippancy" and "prostitution" over his controversial call for euthanasia "booths" on street corners where the elderly and demented can end their lives with "a martini and a medal".
 

US-born Brady, 70, the first woman to win the prestigious Whitbread book of the year award, told the Guardian: "Trivialising a subject of enormous magnitude just to flog a book? How can a man prostitute himself like this?"

 
Brady, whose husband died from a degenerative disease, added: "Amis's schoolboy flippancy leaves euthanasia proponents – serious people, thinking people – open to the attack that they understand nothing about death, that they see it as something out of a TV ad. Your head lolls to one side and it's over, all neat and tidy: a martini and a medal on a street corner, no need even to bother with closing credits."

 
She added: "I watched my husband drown. It took him a week. I heard people down the corridor from him screaming nonstop because to this day, thee is nothing to take that much pain away."

"The first thing I did when my husband was dead was join Dignity in Dying and buy the book Final Exit. I think I know how to do it when the time comes. But suppose I have a stroke first. Suppose I'm hit by a bus and totally disabled. Suppose I can't do it my way. What then? Unless my GP is courageous as well as merciful, I'm all too likely to suffer – literally – the tortures of the damned."

 
Amis, 60, whose latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, is shortly to be published, drew criticism from anti-euthanasia organisations over remarks made in a Sunday Times interview in which he predicted a "silver tsunami" of ageing people, "like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops".

He also ruminated on the potential death of his own talent, saying: "Novelists tend to go off at about 70".

But, said Brady: "As somebody who has just reached 70 – and still publishing – I'm tolerant, if not amused; interested, though, to know how far ahead he will move the cut-off date when he's my age."