‘Every day now strikes me as a gift and I’ll do whatever it takes to carry on’

“BASICALLY, last October [2021], they found a new tumour. That was the biggest one I’ve had, I suppose, and it just took a lot of treatment to get it to start shrinking. I was meant to be off for three months, and it ended up being six.

“I’m incredibly lucky, this is literally down to kind of genomes and things that I don’t really understand. But I’m lucky in that I’ve got bowel cancer, but there are different types of bowel cancer you could have, and mine happens to be one that is responsive. There’s a limited amount of treatments, I think there’s roughly about four or five drugs, and mine has continued to be responsive.

“Having said that, it’s beginning not to be as responsive as it once was, I guess, is a way to put it. But nonetheless, I’m in my ninth year of treatment, and that makes me very lucky.

“You have only got to look at the examples of others, not least people like Deborah James [journalist and columnist]. She got bowel cancer after me and now she’s facing endof-life care. She’s an incredible woman, mother, she’s been personally been very positive. But the cancer hasn’t responded, so luck is one thing.

“There is another element, I guess, which has to do with one’s attitude, and I’m in the camp that I’ll do whatever it takes. Now, there will come a day, I’m sure, when whatever it takes is just kind of too much. But at the moment, I have this attitude. Every day now strikes me as a gift, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get another one of those days. The support of my family, that’s also helped me through all these years of treatment.

“Stage four means it’s an incurable cancer, terminal in that sense. If I look back at my diary, and the six months before I was diagnosed, I was really occupied with work, I had presented the News at Six from Rwanda, from Colombo, from the Philippines. I’d taken the Six on a kind of road show through Britain. The following month I was in South Sudan. I had been to America for one interview – it was a 10-hour trip there and back across the Atlantic. I was firing on all cylinders. Frances [his wife] and I were doing amazing things, living a full life at home.

“In fact, how I ended up being diagnosed was we had arranged to go skiing with friends. I’m not a brilliant skier, but I just love that kind of atmosphere and stuff. Everybody else, for some reason or other, had pulled out. Fran doesn’t ski, she reads books and that sort of thing, and we get together in the afternoon. I said, ‘look, we’ve got this flat that we rented, and I’m just gonna go and get a guide or someone to accompany me.’ And that’s exactly what I did.

“The interesting thing is suddenly I was on my own, skiing in a very calm sort of few days. What it meant was, you’re able to reflect and listen to your body, and I noticed there was some blood in my stool. And I’m absolutely convinced had we been in a full house with all our friends, I’d have said, ‘I’ll check it out when I get back home, it’s probably piles or something like that.’

“Instead, I Googled it. Well, it could be several other things, but it also could be a sign of cancer. So I got back and went to see the GP. He didn’t spot it, but he had the good sense to say to me, ‘look, we need to get some blood tests done.’ They came back and they weren’t too alarming, but we decided I should go see a consultant to check for cancer markers.

“So, it was slightly raised and off the back of this, the consultant did a scan. That’s when the story started. That was Monday. They gave me a sedative and I woke up to be told I had cancer. They did some more scans, and by the Thursday, I realised it was in my liver and my lymph system and it was stage four.

“I was utterly shocked, as you can imagine, and surprised because I didn’t feel ill. One of the things in retrospect that I realised was I had lost weight. I was talking to the GP and they looked at my BMI [body mass index] and said, ‘you’re actually pretty ok but if lost a few pounds, it wouldn’t do any harm.’ Fran and I went on a sort of semi diet and my weight just dropped off. There was a standing joke in the family that Fran couldn’t get two grams off, and I was just shedding it. That’s another sign, of course, but we hadn’t caught that because you just don’t think it’s gonna happen to you.

“There was a horrible gloom as I just sat there in this room. I remember thinking, I’ve got to make that call. Fran was at work and I asked her to get over to the hospital, because they immediately wanted me to go for other things, tests.

“Even now, after years of experience and getting my head around it, I think I’ve got to a place of contentment. I understand that I’m closer to the last day than I would like to be, and I’m content with that. What I’m not content with, and I’ve never been able to be content with is leaving my family behind. In particular, my wife – we’ve built our life together, we’ve known each other since we were at university. I remember dreading making that call and thinking. ‘God, of all the things I have to tell her, this is the one thing I don’t want to tell her.’ I did and, of course, she was straight in a taxi within the hour.”