Somewhere over the past few years we have stopped even pretending that we are glad to be grey and that we love our wrinkles We are fascinated by people who refuse to act their age. Cryonics can be seen as being at the end of a continuum that also contains plastic surgery and body sculpting. I like all the things that everybody else likes."Everybody else also likes to cheat the clock. "Other than that I like Italian food, red wine, playing squash, foreign holidays, good company, witty people, nice cars and being warm in the winter.

I worry about whether foot fetishists will ever come out of the closet and why kamikaze pilots wear crash helmets," he says, pausing for weak smiles. "Yes I do consider myself perfectly normal though I do have a rather peculiar sense of humour. His real goal is simply never to stop living.I ask the obvious question. I have particularly good memories, from the mid-Fifties, of the Naafi club in Singapore - a superb, modern building close to the Raffles Hotel. There, on Sundays, I would eat well, having raised the cash by diving to the bottom of the big swimming pool to retrieve coins lost by tired and emotional servicemen, who had fallen in the night before.GERALD HAIGHBedworth,Warwickshire. The big Naafi clubs particularly, in main garrisons, went a little way towards redressing the ludicrous difference between the social facilities for officers and sergeants and those for other ranks.

No one who had actually eaten and drunk in a Naafi would make the kind of criticisms (tough chops; bromide tea) that were in your original piece. Sir: T H K Barron is right (letter, 3 February). I would remind Eric Berman that Protocol 1, Article 54 of the Geneva Convention states: "Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited".GEOFF SIMONSStockport, Cheshire. He believes there have been breakthroughs in the 1990s already and quotes a scientist who says that soon "there will be 80-year-olds with skin like babies" His real goal, he confides, is not to be frozen at all.

I'd love that."In the meantime, he remains earthbound and selling vitamins - a business he got into because of his interest in life extension. I could leave the planet and explore parts of the solar system, perhaps go to another part of the galaxy and see what it's like. I can visualise that if I were young- looking, fit and healthy and I could do things. Paul, his wife Maureen and their son Alex are all signed up to be frozen in time at the Cryonics Institute in Detroit.Mr Michaels does not want to live for ever, mind you, just 10,000 years "I can't come to terms with the idea of living for ever That's why I've picked a period of 10,000 years. It is already very popular with the Michaels family of Leighton Buzzard. Cryonicists say it is just a matter of time."I tell you when it will be popular - when they freeze a monkey in liquid nitrogen and then revive it Then it will be very popular," says Paul Michaels.

There are only about 800 people in the world who have made "the ultimate in pre-arrangements" so far but more are destined to follow. The subject even made it to The Simpsons recently and no Radio 4 programme seems complete without a guest who plans to spend a significant portion of time with his veins full of anti-freeze and his body or brain suspended in a vacuum flask. More of us are living longer than ever before in the West and we want to believe - and many are already putting their money where their collagen-enhanced mouths are - that a cream can be invented to smooth away our wrinkles and our woes as well.Cryonics is going through one of its "media darling" phases, sparked by the rat's heart experiment and fed by pre-millennium tension. There is much talk about gene-mapping and nanotechnology and cell lifespans. The idea of life extension used to be the stuff of science fiction but now we're all watching The X-Files and there is a serious debate going on over whether ageing itself might be reversible. People ask me why I want to live for ever but it is just that I don't want to be dead and there is no in-between except, of course, possibly daytime television."Scientists tsk-tsk about the rat's heart experiment but Mr Smyth is right when he says that the world is getting closer to his point of view.