So next morning when my wife phoned up the ward I was in, ‘oh no, no, hes been moved. Hes in the cardiology unit. Panic stations and I must admit, I felt depressed when I found out I’d had a heart attack. ‘Why me?’ All my life I’d been working on my feet and I thought I was fit. I thought, ‘Why me?

Theres other people who sit down at desks, you know bigger than me, so ‘Why me?’ and I was angry as well, it’s hard to explain. You don’t think you’ve survived and thank god you have, but it was a couple of days later when somebody else came in to the hospital who was younger than me, because everyone else in this ward was older and I was the youngest, and when this person came in who was younger than me, I felt a lot better. It’s a terrible thing to say now, but I did.

You can do anything you want. As I say, were going on holiday shortly, we love cruising although we haven’t been on one for a while because we have a daughter in Australia, so we had to do a family visit to Australia. Weve a son in the States, so we had to do a family visit to the States.

So this time it’s a holiday for us; about ten islands in about fourteen days round the Caribbean and every other day, were snorkelling. Not bothered about seeing the sites of plantations and that, weve done all that. Get me in the water, the snorkelling. I can’t dive because of my asthma but I’d love to, so I can snorkel.

You can do anything you want if you’re fit enough and you don’t have complications after a heart attack. I pity the people who do have complications and I come across an awful lot of them as Chairman and I sympathise with them. But even they can get over it and a lot have.