I used to try and do full-time work and look after my daughter and I realised that I actually didn’t want to do that, that I wanted to make sure I just spent as much time as I could with my daughter. And I have had, you know, five very happy years, five and a half very happy years since, and I know that I wouldn’t have had those five happy years had I not had the illness. I would’ve been very much more focused on my work and trying to keep my CV looking good, and I think it just helps you put things into perspective. You hear people say it but it’s probably not till it really happens that, and it is that complete taking the rug from underneath your feet feel, that is horrible at the time but a huge wonderful life learning, and I think if people can hang on to the fact that it will have huge positive sides to it and keep that in mind, that they’ll actually probably be pleased they’ve had it, it will help them with the down days really.

Right. I wanted to ask you how long it took to get your life back to normal once you got home? If indeed it did go back to normal.

Life changes. And I touched on earlier, you sort of look at things slightly differently. Life getting back to normal, I decided to change my life, not in any major way, but I decided to go and do something that I hadn’t, I’d touched on before when I was in employment, part of my life I’d been involved in a setting, taking an American company multi-national in the music industry. And I had had great fun for three or four years setting up companies all round the world, being in at the beginning. And I’d done not a bad job and thought, Well I like property, let’s go and see, go and do something like that. I didn’t particularly want to become a property developer but I wanted to do something connected with property. And so I ended up being part of a team of people who’d bought an old house and have been doing restoration of old properties, which brings different challenges and different looks and things and the way to do things, which is that’s about, and so that changed me on that score, so I did that and that’s there.

But I think one of the major decisions I took was to go back into full-time education and do a masters. And I’d always wanted to do it but I never felt, because the prognosis wasn’t that great and the doctors were, you know, every time I asked them about, you know, whether I should commit to a longer term plan of any sort, they would always kind of look a little bit hesitant. But I think the day the doctors actually said to me, Listen. Your Philadelphia chromosome has actually.. – I think the word they used is it’s reversed in some way – and, you know, The disease has actually kind of stopped still in its track, rather than the danger of it being, you know, moving the other way. That’s the time that I felt, Okay. Now I can actually commit to a longer term pla. That’s when I decided to do my masters.

So that was, I started doing my masters in 2001. Obviously, I planned for it, I applied and all of those things. 2001 to 2002 I did my masters. Before that, all of, up to that time I was just working in my administrative job. And then after doing that, that’s when I kind of moved into a professional career. So before that I was just a, I was doing other work. But I always wanted to do that, so sort of get a professional qualification and then move along in that career. So that’s what I did then, which has been really good, so I’ve been lucky in many respects.

And I did go back in the April after the radiotherapy had finished, but I stayed about a month and I thought, No I don’, in that respect I didn’t want to do that anymore. Yeah that’s it, I did think about, saying that it didn’t change my life, it sort of, I started doing things that I’d always said I wanted to do but never did. I took myself off to college and I did an access course to art and design because I’d always wanted to do something arty when I was younger and never did, messed up my education, just sort of came out of school with five O-levels and went straight to work. And I suppose I wanted, yeah I did, I wanted to go to art college at the time, but this prompted me to do something about it and went to college, did an access course and I was greatly encouraged to apply to university.

So I did and got into two. I got into one university to do a degree, a BA in, what was it now? It was to do, I can’t remember, some kind of arts and furnishings and things. It was a really interesting course but the unfortunate thing was it was up in London and it was at least three full days a week, and with having the children it was difficult to do. So I opted for another university and did an applied arts degree, but I only completed one year because of sort of constraints, family and what have you. But hopefully one day I will go back to it.

But, yeah, I suppose in that respect it’s given me more confidence to a degree. I will do things now that I didn’t, I was a bit sort of sheepish with, let’s say, a little while ago, so in that respect, yes. And even my job now I think I’m doing because I’m slightly more confident. I work in a school, I work with kids and I thoroughly enjoy it, I think it’s one of the best jobs I’ve done. So yeah, so I think my confidence has grown through the experience.

Yes, I do have some regrets actually. Because I think I’m still fairly young and I still, I had lots of papers that were sort of, you know, halfway, your revise and resubmit type things, and I just stopped really and put them to one side. And they’re not things now you can, you know, two or three years later you can’t go back to the journal and say, you know, Remember me, you know, two or three years ag, because things move on. And I have, I’m not sure whether, I mean I suppose in a perfect world none of this would have happened, I’d have carried on until I was, you know, probably sixty-two or sixty-three, and retired. But, you know, this had happened, I was able to get a very favourable financial deal from my employer and I was able to take retirement and still work part-time. So in that way it worked out very well. But I still felt I had a bit of my career to run.

And I have found it quite difficult to make adjustments to finding things that I find worthwhile, particularly, I suppose ironically, because the disease now takes up less and less of my time, you know, I’m only having now to go, touch wood, to hospital once every three months. I was discharged from the melanoma treatment, which is a different hospital, a few weeks ago they decided I don’t have to go back again at all. So having, it being a central part of your life, it has now become a peripheral part, and at the same time your work has become a peripheral part. And although my children are at an age where they do actually need quite a lot of help in some respects, they’re also, in a year or two, will be off. So there has been, I mean my wife’s younger than I am, she’s ten years younger than me and still mid-career really in some respects. So I’ve had to make some adjustments and think about what else to do.