My very clever wife, she decided that if she was going to keep me alive, having been totally committed to a very interesting job – one that I’d loved, I’d done it since I was fifteen, never wanted to change – she had to find a substitute. So she told me to dream, she said, ‘What have you wanted to do?’ And I said, ‘Well I’ve always wanted to work. And she said, ‘Well I’m sorry love but that’s not on the cards. What have you dreamed of doing, not what have you wanted to do, but what have you dreamed of doing?’ And it was the difference between wanting and dreaming that was the important bit because I’d always dreamed of having a boat, it didn’t really matter what sort. And she had been made redundant about six months before and had a little money tucked away in a savings account, and when I said that I’ve always really wanted to sail, I’ve always dreamt of sailing, she said, ‘Well let’s go and buy a boat. Came back twenty minutes later and said, ‘I think well find out if you like sailing before we spend my money.

The upshot of that was at Easter we did a competent crew together, we did a day skipper theory together, I did the day skipper practical in the September and we bought a boat in November.

You’re then feeling pretty horrible, weak, can’t do much and it was during this time that the boat really came into its own. I didn’t sail, it was on the water or in the yard, the great thing about it was that I could dream. I could dream where I was going to go, what I was going to do, how I was to improve the boat without spending an absolute fortune in the chandlers. What ideas I could gather from the magazines and adapt, what ideas I could take from my experience as a surveyor and adapt for the boat. And obviously as a surveyor you have to do drainage and sanitation, water supplies and things like that, all of which you could use because basically a boat, or at least a cruising boat is a little home, got to have all the same sort of things. And eventually I managed to achieved my dreams, I sailed across to France and over a period of three years spent four, six and then eight weeks in France over three separate summers and had crew come and join me so that I could sail with people who knew what my situation was. And well, as I say, just achieved my dreams and go through some experiences like coming back across the channel with no wind, under engine.

Anyway I went in and I had the first batch of treatment which basically meant you sat there for well anything from two to five hours waiting for this stuff to drip in your arm. Got home, felt OK for the first couple of days and then it hit you, and basically it was fludarabine and it was destroying quite a lot of me. And as you went on your blood had to recover, and when your blood had recovered, usually about a month, you could then have another treatment. And you went back in again and for a week you walked around with this needle stuck in your arm, and to those of you who are hairy-armed, as I am, shave them before you go in because these little sticky pads that they have move around on the hairs and if you don’t have bare arms believe you me it’s painful. And don’t have them put in the hand because you bend your hand too much, the arm is the only place, it’s straight and you cant muck it up. Trouble is they do have a propensity not to be able to find a vein, but that’s another story.

I insisted that they went, where possible, they went into my arm, between my elbow and my wrist so that the needle was actually into a part of my body which didnt bend. I mean what they like to do is put it in the back of the hand because the veins are nice and easy to see, but the hand bends which, although the needle is soft plastic, it still tends to irritate. Youve got it in there for a week, it still tends to irritate and pull out, which means theyve then got to go and find it or do it back again, and you’re left at home with a needle hanging out or youve got to take it out and stop it yourself without the supervision. Whereas if they put it in the arm which has been shaved, the arm stays still and having no hairs on it the whole thing grips and youve got no problem. you’re also slightly less likely to knock it because, as I say, this thing is in there from Monday morning through till, well, Friday afternoon.

Nowadays if I get a sore throat coming, and sometimes I do as part of a cold, I immediately go to the doctor and get some antibiotics, I don’t even have to go and see him, I can ring him up and say, ‘I’ve got a sore throat, can I have some antibiotics?’ Because he knows that if he doesn’t give them to me I’m going to end up with a very sore throat, and so get it early, kill it and it’s OK. I get the cold the same as, but I don’t get the sore throat, which on the occasions I have left it have been pretty rotten.

So do you have to careful in general not to pick up infections?

People are more conscious of this than I am. My wife, for instance, was with somebody who had mumps and was infectious a couple of nights ago and, you know, weve spoken and waved since then, that’s about it. She tries to protect me, shes very good that way. And the children also have been good about it, you know, if the youngsters have got coughs or colds or stuff like that.

And the other thing I do take is 1000 milligrams of vitamin C every day basically to try and stimulate the.

Immune system?

Immune system, yeah. And if I can keep that active then’

Do you think that’s effective?

I don’t want to stop taking it and find out if you don’t mind. I guess it’s a question of belief. Yes I do think it helps, I don’t get as many colds as I used to, although of course theres reduced resistance, I take the flu jab anyway every year, but I tend not to get colds and, you know, apart from the urinary infection, which is probably because I’ve been lying down a lot, I’ve been reasonably fit.

I must admit I suppose I was very selfish, I went into my shell, I couldn’t talk about it. I spoke about it to a preacher friend, or a priest friend of mine, vicar friend of mine and said ‘Look I don’t want to tell anybody about this because I’m a business man, I’m on my own, and if it gets round that I’ve got cancer all my clients will disappear, I shall lose everything. Maybe I just had some very special clients because nobody said that. Everybody said, ‘As long as you think you can do the job well employ you.

So you did tell them?

Eventually after about three months I found the courage to tell them. Well the vicar put it quite succinctly, he said ‘Were all going to die, you’ve been told that you’ve got maybe seven years, you’ve got a chance to go and do what you want in that seven years and put it right. He said, ‘I could walk out of this house tomorrow, fall under a bus and I’m dead and my family are left in this terrible situation, so you’re rather lucky actually’, which is an odd way of looking at being told you’re going to die, but it has changed my views. In fact when I told him after about three months it was OK to talk to people if people asked about me – because apparently people had been asking why was I changed – he said it’s the hardest thing hes ever had to do. He said as a priest you get given many secrets, he said, but this was one of the hardest hed ever had to do because he couldn’t even tell his wife, whom obviously I knew fairly well.

You decided you had to give up work’

Mm.

‘through your illness and you were self employed?

Yeah.

So were there financial implications for you?

Yes we, as I say, over the first three years of stopping work, the firm I had, in inverted commas, sold my business to, they took over my clients and I got a percentage of the fees that they earned from those clients, which frankly helped pay off the overdraft. And in the very early days of going self-employed my wife had said, ‘Right, if you’re going self-employed the time is going to come, or may come, when you might be ill and not able to work and you’ve got employees to pay and you’ve got other things to pay, mortgages and stuff like that. Do you think you ought to take a permanent health insurance policy?’ I had a brother who was involved in insurance and he got me a very good one. It didn’t crack in for a year so we had a year when we just lived on my wifes money, but after the year it gave me, after some considerable negotiation, it gave me a reasonable income so that we weren’t totally reliant on her money. But unfortunately it only lasted until I was sixty-five so it has now stopped, and now we shall find out whether the investment we made in the small property in Watford and then sold and have reinvested elsewhere, whether that’s going to give us sufficient income to live on.

And you must’ve had some pension schemes?

No.

No?

Well by the time I became self-employed and got to the stage where I actually could put some money by, I was beginning to get to the stage where in fact there wasn’t any money to put by because I wasn’t able to work the way I wanted to work.