Still or sparkling?

I am mildly averse to scandalmongering, but I cannot resist linking to this little piece about the death of Alan Bennett's female lover because it represents such a good example of how to deflect (if one were only witty and British!) an intrusive or impertinent question:

After the media furore over Bennett's reverse outing died down in the mid-1990s, portraits of the playwright and photographs of him posing with the painter David Hockney on the walls of Davies's tearoom were the only public clues to the pair's long-term relationship. Bennett, meanwhile, kept outsiders in the dark about his sexual preferences. When asked once by the actor Sir Ian McKellen at an Aids benefit whether he was heterosexual or homosexual, Bennett replied: "That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water."