Clive James On Regret, Illness, And Plans For Final Days of Binging
His looming death. The roving eye that wrecked his marriage. And how he’ll spend what time he has left in front of the box. Clive James tells Event why he ‘won’t lie down and wait for the end’…
It’s been nearly two years since Clive James announced that leukaemia was about to kill him, provoking a rush of tributes that turned out to be premature.
He wrote a poem saying he’d never see the leaves on the Japanese maple in his garden turn green again, and everyone took that as his big goodbye, but it was the tree that died first.
‘We’ve had it replaced,’ he says.
But while the outspoken Australian writer and broadcaster is grateful to be hanging on to life with the help of an experimental new drug, the 76-year old who shuffles to the door of his Cambridge home is clearly weakened and doesn’t know how much time is left.
‘I thought I was a goner two weekends ago when I woke up at 4.30 in the morning with a tongue bigger than my mouth,’ he says in a croakier version of that flat, wise-guy Aussie voice so widely imitated during his glory days as a TV star. Read more at Daily Mail.
