I rolled back the images. Looked again. There it was. A new tumor, large, filling my right middle lobe. It looked, oddly, like a full moon having almost cleared the horizon. Going back to the old images, I could make out the faintest trace of it, a ghostly harbinger now brought fully into the world. I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the Earth.

I’m getting closer all the time.

I had a cardiac arrest in 2010. I also had a close call in the early days in Cardiff when I was in a band called the Denims. We were in a van driving along a narrow mountain road. Somebody wanted to go to the toilet, so we stopped, and afterwards the driver took a wrong turn and we went careering down the mountain. Everyone was screaming, it was like a nightmare. At the bottom was the railway line, but the van stopped just in time. We were very lucky.

A horse-riding accident when I was about 15.

Having regrets and not knowing what to do about them.

To be stuck in the past.

It’s usually a slight feeling that, having got through the day, I didn’t get any time to do any writing or something creative – it was a lot of admin, exhaustion from that and rumination.

A movie. Does it have a name? It might do.

I’ve not always been great friend material. I’ve tried to get better at that, so to be remembered as reliable by a few would be great.

You reach a certain point in life and suddenly know a lot of dead people, and I’ve noticed you don’t stop getting to know people who are dead. Those relationships continue and I like that.