Every 90 days I lie in a whirling CT machine, dye coursing through my veins, and the doctors look to see whether the tumors in my liver are growing. If they are not, the doctors smile and schedule another scan. The rhythm has been the same since my doctors told me I had stage IV colon cancer two and a half years ago. I live for three months, take a deep breath and hope to start over again. I will probably do this for the rest of my life. Whatever that means.

I just thought right away that I wanted to work. ... This is a good job. It's been a good job. Work is the most effective drug there can possibly be. ... I'm on the periphery of a lot of despair, of course. ... You'd have to be stupid not to be. I have my moments when I'm not too thrilled about this whole deal. But at the same time, the songs have never come like this, so I'd have to feel more gratitude than anything else. I'm probably in the intensest creative period of my life.

I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

Yeah. These books are all around me and they'll be here when I go and I'm that sick. I just don't know when it ends. But in 2010, I got really ill and leukaemia was one of the things I was diagnosed with and eventually it will switch me off. So it raises the question: what do you do? Do you lie down and give up? Read the Bible? Or do you go on as you were reading and writing. And I've done the second and I've just done a little bit called Latest Readings which is about the books I've been reading lately and I could do another volume of that because I'm still reading.

A close, loving family and work position in society which is meaningful, which is about making the world a better place rather than getting a bigger - having a bigger bank account.

Sufficiently well to see Johnson and Truss and then two or three days later, she’s dead. I thought, that’s fantastic. That’s something to celebrate. That’s a great death.

It was fear of suffering before dying, and of, you know, lingering on, being in a hospital bed. And I hate hospitals, always have done. I think they're horrible places, even though I spent most of my life working in them. No, it's really - death itself holds no fears for me at all, as far as - I love the famous 18th century philosopher David Hume, who on his deathbed was asked, aren't you terribly worried about what will happen after death? And he said, no, I'm no more worried about not existing after death than I'm worried about not existing before I was born. And that is my view about death. I don't believe in an afterlife. But I know, as a doctor, that dying can be very unpleasant.

I was looking at ageing in action, in black-and-white MRI pixels, death and dissolution foretold, and already partly achieved. My 70-year-old brain was shrunken and withered, a worn and sad version of what it once must have been. There were also ominous white spots in the white matter, signs of ischaemic damage, small-vessel disease, known in the trade as white matter hyperintensities – there are various names for them. They looked like some evil pox. Not to put too fine a point on it, my brain is starting to rot. I am starting to rot. It is the writing on the wall, a deadline.

I was terribly upset at the time, because I felt I had betrayed [my wife] Kate and my family by being so stupid. But I’ve accepted it.

For the last few weeks, I've been completely happy. I've got my next PSA in three weeks' time. It may well show my PSA is starting to go up, and the cancer's coming back. Totally to my surprise, I've acquired this sort of Buddhist Zen outlook. Well, the future doesn't exist. I'm well. I'm happy at the moment. I've had a wonderful, exciting life. I've made lots of mistakes. I've trampled on people - yak, yak, yak, as I discuss in my books. But at the moment, today, the sun is shining. I'm very well. It's not that I'm in denial, but I think, well, all right. It may be bad news in three weeks' time, but that's three weeks away. At the moment, I'm well.