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We are seeing lots of young people with melanoma. It's actually scared me quite a bit.

The bad news is that my thin melanoma has something called mitosis, which means the cancer cells are dividing and multiplying even as I write. My thin melanoma has already spread outside of the tumor and into the deep layers of skin.

We all live in fear of cancer, but to be told you have skin cancer was terrifying.

Cancer is the most pernicious, insidious, disgusting disease of life.

I've gone to skin doctors and they'll say to you, 'We should remove this because it's pre-cancerous,' and I'll say, 'Explain pre-cancerous to me.' I'll listen for about twenty minutes and I'll say excuse me, 'Is pre-cancerous like pre-dead? So you're saying it could turn into cancer but it's not cancer?'

But do remember that the most important risk factor for cancer is growing older. Most cancers occur in people over the age of 65.

It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.

In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks.

It's so important to encourage the use of suncream, tan in a bottle and the disuse of sunbeds which are known world-wide as causes of skin cancer.

Cancer is like the common cold; there are so many different types. In the future we'll still have cancer, but we'll detect it very, very early, so that it won't kill anybody. We'll zap it at the molecular level decades before it grows into a tumor.