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A fellow patient, a big bloke with a florid complexion who looked as if he knew his way around a three-course dinner, appeared to share my distaste of needles. Yet one afternoon, while I was being hooked up and staring intently into the distance as if I expected Liz Hurley to walk in stark naked at any second; I noticed that the big bloke was watching me in horrified fascination.

With his snowy locks, arresting blue eyes and impressive red face, his head looked like the Russian flag. But he didn't look well. For a minute, I thought he was about to topple on to me like one of those communist statues they pulled down after Yeltsin got his hands on the keys to the Kremlin cocktail cabinet.

Instead, he just sat there and sweated. That was one blessing counted. Rachel gave me my chemo four times and nurse Susie once over the course of five months. I was just beginning to persuade the unit's lovely receptionists, Sue and Carole, to call me George when the consultant and his crew called me in to give me a CaT Scan and some bad news. The carpet bombing chemo wasn't working any more. The cancer had spread. The prognosis, they admitted, could scarcely be worse.

"Three months - although we must stress that this is the average life expectancy of someone in your condition..."

I walked down the hill from the hospital like a man who had just been handed a pogo stick and told to negotiate his way through a minefield ...blindfold.

I don't believe I have ever felt more empty or lonely.

I was 48 years old and they had just told me it was almost certain that I would never be 49. I went home to our waterside apartment and sat looking out of the window at the small boats on the harbour, with their puffed-up, confident sails filled by the breeze blowing up from the south.

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