Joan Bakewell: I love my life. That's why I've made a living will Not to write a will at all is seriously neglectful. It can burden your family with disputes and delays at the very time when, you hope, they will be hit by grief at losing you. It can turn the sympathy and tenderness of the funeral into rancorous squabbles that risk descending through the generations. Think of Greek tragedy. It can be as bad in Surbiton or Sheffield. So write a will of some sort, however simple. I made a grievous mistake some years ago when I wrote an article in praise of inheritance tax. It is a good tax, I argued, because you are not even there when you have to pay it, and second, you can avoid paying large parts of it by going on a spending spree before your death. I still hold this view. Where I was mistaken was in expecting people to agree with me. In fact, I was inundated with a torrent of abusive comments denouncing me for proposing to steal from people what was justly theirs, while some readers even sent messages of sympathy and condolences to my children for having such a brutal mother. Only then did I realise how powerful a drive it is in human beings to want to bequeath something to their descendants. "I have worked all my life to see my children better off" was the general feeling. Looking back, I can see that in tribal terms it has always been the case, with Biblical brothers vying to divide the sheep and goats, and historical families from the Medicis to the Churchills building the family fortunes to pass on down the line. Today, Russian oligarchs and political dictators are among those who follow the same tradition, starting dynasties of their own and fighting their way up the latest Rich List. But whatever your means or political leanings, what is beyond dispute is that if you want to control your inheritance and avoid litigation among your descendants, then you would be wise to write a will, making your intentions clear, naming individuals and institutions and specifying sums of money, even what should happen to granny's gold watch. And then there's "the living will." I have already written mine - now called an Advance Directive - and lodged copies with my doctor, my solicitor and my family. It specifies what should be done to my body were I to be struck down by a medical catastrophe or a big red bus and my life rendered that of a living vegetable. In it, you can specify your thoughts and feelings about what should happen if you are diagnosed with a terminal condition. It is legally endorsed by the Mental Health Capacity Act 2005 and should be taken into consideration by the healthcare professionals who are looking after you. I had an eerie conversation with my children about just how long I should be sustained in a vegetative state before they agree for the plugs to be pulled. In the end, I decided to yield control and left the final decision to them and the medical staff involved. "Control" is a key word. It is part of the argument behind Lord Falconer's Assisted Dying Bill, to be presented soon in the House of Lords. The question is: should people have a say in how they end their lives and have their wishes respected by medical staff, or must they die according to existing rules that inhibit any final assistance at the extremity of life? As things are, assisted dying is illegal and people stand to be prosecuted if they help loved ones - or indeed anyone - who has a terminal illness and wishes to die. That's why tonight in the House of Lords professional actors will be giving a reading of Nell Dunn's play Home Death, which deals sympathetically with death and bereavement. It is a non-polemical play and all the more powerful for that. Afterwards I shall chair a debate with Lord Falconer between those who support him and those from the hospice movement who disagree. It is my hope that the discussion will open some areas of agreement as we make clear to each other what we have in common, that those we love, and indeed everyone, should have a death that is without fear or pain and experienced in the best way possible. This is an issue that goes beyond politics: even the generation of young people who declare themselves indifferent to the political world have a view on how they might be treated were they seriously injured, and indeed how to treat their own failing relations. My view is that we should seek to accommodate as many different outlooks as possible - the religious and the secular - in creating laws that allow death to be the intimate, considered and gentle experience it should be. After all, it's the last one any of us will have.