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.

We used to have one of those gat guns that shot pellets. My friend pretty much had the thing at point-blank range to my temple. It popped out and completed its trajectory about a millimetre from my head.

Maybe the night we drove a Hummer in Kabul and went to a cafe that Osama bin Laden supposedly used to frequent.

Where do I begin? There have been a lot.

My mum, because she’s been a nurse for over 40 years. She works in a hospice, and there’s no bullshit with her.

That all the cliches about people in the music industry are true.

Surviving the music industry. I think it’s been responsible for killing a lot of musicians. Lots of us have mental health issues, and drink and drug problems, and the industry doesn’t really care.

Everyone I ever met in 2007, because I was definitely about two hours late.

British summers give me a really happy feeling. My bedroom at our family home in Harrow looks out on to our garden and a cricket field, and you just know when it’s the first day of summer.