Went on holiday, weather was awful, nearly died.
It is a paradox universally acknowledged that every year when I leave polluted London for the fresh, sea air of West Cornwall, my asthma always gets worse. 
I don’t know if it’s damp or dust or dander in the chalet where we stay, but it’s always prudent for me to pack a few extra inhalers.
This year, though, it wasn’t enough and out of the blue one evening I had the worst asthma attack of my life – I even said (croaked) at one point “this is it, I’m going to die”.
I probably can’t have been that close to death (though it bloody well felt like it at the time) as I was not guided to any lights, my life failed to flash before me – though the last few pictures on my Flickr photostream did. I remember wondering if I really wanted to be remembered by a photo of the back of a VW camper van bearing the slogan “don’t worry, be hippy”.
Rural health services are often denigrated – indeed it took (what seemed to me) a small eternity for the ambulance to arrive, but then I was staying somewhere fairly remote in the sand dunes which is hard enough to find in the day, let alone at midnight in an area with no street lights.
I do have a lot of time for our local Big London Teaching Hospital – they saved my eldest son’s life and my wife’s life twice. But if you have to spend any of your holiday in hospital, West Cornwall Hospital in Penzance does seem like a particularly nice place to do it. Everyone was incredibly friendly, the place seemed to be awash with doctors and nurses. When I’ve visited our London hospital it seems like you can go all day without seeing a doctor of any kind and hours without seeing a nurse, but in Penzance the ward round was a friendly, ambling affair and medical staff were in and out of the ward all morning. 
It may be standard practice in the NHS now, but it was scrupulously clean – in the morning they pulled my bed out to clean behind it and even cleaned the bed itself (with me in it). Even the food was pretty good – I can recommend the chicken and leak pie, by the way – even if the wine list left a lot to be desired.
I woke up this morning – too early but alive, chest clear, back in my chalet bed. And as I type this, the wind has dropped, the sun is rising, the sky is blue – and there is an improbable-looking half rainbow out at sea. You probably can’t ask for more than that.
