I wouldn’t have tried to break up a fight when I was 17.

My sister’s death – I would love to meet her kids. [Karen Grammer was 18 when she was abducted, raped and murdered.]

I should have known that I might not like what my brain scan showed, just as I should have known that the symptoms of prostatism that were increasingly bothering me were just as likely to be caused by cancer as by the benign prostatic enlargement that happens in most men as they age. But I continued to think that illness happened to patients and not to doctors, even though I was now retired. Twenty months after I had my brain scanned, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. I had had typical symptoms for years, steadily getting worse, but it took me a long time before I could bring myself to ask for help. I thought I was being stoical when in reality I was being a coward. I simply couldn’t believe the diagnosis at first, so deeply ingrained was my denial.

My mother and my brother would still be alive. So much of my life has been coping with the grief of losing them.

Pulling Sandra.

That my mum and dad didn’t move to live by the sea, where we live, before they died.

It used to be worrying about football results.

When I met [my wife] Sandra. I was coming up 17. We met at the Two Puddings, a dance hall in Stratford.

As someone who had time for everybody.

A car accident in Italy in 1990. Four people got killed. I was lucky, I got thrown out.