I’d like to see all my friends. I would have my breakfast and then I would go to Ireland and see my friends – Frank McGuinness, Penny and Desmond Guinness…all those people. I would have lunch in the castle with Penny and Desmond and maybe some other people, then in the afternoon I would go to New York and do the same thing.

If the rain held off, I’d walk down to Lough Ine, stopping at the shrine to say a few words to Herself and rile a few fairies. I’d take a sloop out, do a few perimeters and have a chat with Labhrai Loinsigh. I’d maybe walk up furry mountain and take in the view.

Let’s pretend I’ve been training for my pilot’s licence. I’d like to take off in a two-seater sea plane from the loch in Mull and land it expertly in the little boating lake at Heaton Park. Which interestingly has a pair of my spectacles at the bottom of it from my last day at school in 1990.

I guess I would wake up, have breakfast with my children. Then I’d go to the studio and make the best record of my life, and then have a lot of sex! That sounds pretty balanced, I think!

He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.

And of course, I wonder why I was not more vigilant about checking my skin, because if I had been, I would have picked up that first melanoma before it turned bad, and saved myself a lot of heartache. When I was first diagnosed, I was angry with myself for being too lazy and stupid to bother with anything but the occasional quick examination. But then I decided that kind of thinking was a waste of my time, because we start dying the moment we are born. I know that now. The knowledge has changed from a first illuminating but soon forgotten premonition into an undeniable lived reality.

As far as I can tell, I’ll either succumb to some opportunistic infection, for which I’ve refused antibiotics in advance, or, having similarly declined forced feeding, I’ll starve to death. ... I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones.

How many times I could have died before now, and in how many different ways. And yet I came close only once: a speeding sedan ran a red light, hit three other vehicles, and jack-knifed into my rear wheel split second after I’d stepped out of my parked car. A bystander described the scene to me later. “You were a millimetre away from losing your legs,” he said.

So many times I’ve wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I’d just been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I’d be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road are our lives made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.