It will delight his family and his many admirers, of course, but Clive James has admitted to feeling “embarrassment” at still being alive, a year after predicting his imminent death from cancer.

The Australian broadcaster and critic, who has been receiving treatment for terminal leukaemia for more than five years, writes of blushing at the realisation he had “written myself into a corner” by announcing last September that he would die very shortly, when in fact his health has rallied thanks to an experimental drug treatment.

That prediction came in a poem called Japanese Maple, published in September 2014, in which James suggested that when the leaves of a tree in his garden turned brown, it would “end the game” of his own life.

In fact, he writes in his column, “Winter arrived, there has been a whole other summer, and now the maple is just starting to do its flaming thing all over again, with me shyly watching.”

A new chemotherapy medication prescribed to the writer earlier this year is “holding back the lurgy”, he writes, “leaving me stuck with the embarrassment of still being alive”.

Despite his own sheepishness, however, “people are still sympathetic, except perhaps for some of my Australian critics, the most scornful of whom has always wanted me dead anyway”.



James revealed earlier this week, in a conversation recorded for the Cheltenham literature festival, that he spent much of his time watching TV box sets including Game of Thrones and the West Wing, which left him feeling “appalled” at the amount of time he had devoted to fictional worlds.

“If you’re a grown man – indeed more than a grown man – if you’re a man who has grown old to the point of death and you’re sitting there watching a box set of Game of Thrones, you’re bound to ask yourself: ‘What is life?’ What is life for? Why am I waiting for Sean Bean to get executed? What is going on here?’

“Well, I suppose the Americans would call it the thrill of the story. I don’t know what it is. It’s rather fun to be in the same conversation as everyone else.”

James admits to another TV obsession in his column, revealing he was persuaded by his family to watch the latter stages of the Great British Bake Off, which he describes as “Formula One with cars you can eat”. He wept, he writes, when contestant Flora’s lemon cream horns failed, “but the charming Nadiya is a star of tomorrow”.