I am resisting a colleague’s urging for me to reveal the full horror of my 12-hour journey home from a holiday in the Greek islands last Thursday, with a severe three-day case of ‘the squits’ still laying me low. Perhaps another time.

Instead, let me tell you of one of the journey’s highlights, which came in the screening of the new film The Age of Adaline on the British Airways 767 that carried me back from Athens.

I rarely bother to watch – much less put on earphones to listen to – the in-flight movies, preferring to read a book or newspaper.

On this occasion, though, I was captivated by the radiant beauty of the star, Blake Lively, as displayed on the screen above me. This was not just in her character’s 21st-century guise but also as she appeared in footage showing her in the 1930s and 1960s.

The plot concerns a woman in whom the process of ageing is miraculously suspended at the age 29 and who survives unchanged for a further eight decades.

Despite a rapid descent into silliness when a former beau (Harrison Ford) is discovered to be the father of her latest one (Michiel Huisman), the film still proved very enjoyable.

Part of its appeal for me came in the similarity of the plot to that of one of my favourite operas, Janacek’s The Makropulos Case. In this case, the heroine Emilia Marty has survived to be more than 300.

Back in England, reading one of the newspapers that accumulated during my absence, I was sorry to learn of the death of the opera director Nikolaus Lehnhoff. He had charge of a notably fine 1995 production of Makropulos which I saw both at Glyndebourne and later on tour to Oxford.

Anyone who saw it is unlikely to have forgotten the amazing set, all of it moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, across the stage to symbolise the never ending passage of time for Emilia.