Yes! With my fiancée about two years ago, we were biking in the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park in California and we were stalked by a mountain lion for hours… It really changed my perception! But you know, they’re peaceful cats, there wasn’t any anger or aggression — that’s just the way it is in nature. It’s good sometimes to realize you can die! The experience made me realize that you have to know where you are, and know that the place you’re in is alive.

When I was a kid in Tooting, our house caught fire. We didn’t realise until the fire brigade turned up.

Right after 9/11, Kenny and I went to perform for the troops in Pakistan and Uzbekistan. As we were flying in, an electronic voice went off: “Warning: missile launch! Warning: missile launch!” The Taliban had fired a rocket at us. I was waiting to see the back of the plane blow up, but it didn’t and we landed.

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.

So many times I’ve wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I’d just been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I’d be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road are our lives made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.

I move from my bed in my bedroom, to my sofa here in the living room, and basically I stay here and I'm fed delectables all day and that's about it.

And of course, I wonder why I was not more vigilant about checking my skin, because if I had been, I would have picked up that first melanoma before it turned bad, and saved myself a lot of heartache. When I was first diagnosed, I was angry with myself for being too lazy and stupid to bother with anything but the occasional quick examination. But then I decided that kind of thinking was a waste of my time, because we start dying the moment we are born. I know that now. The knowledge has changed from a first illuminating but soon forgotten premonition into an undeniable lived reality.

As far as I can tell, I’ll either succumb to some opportunistic infection, for which I’ve refused antibiotics in advance, or, having similarly declined forced feeding, I’ll starve to death. ... I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones.

He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.