What helped to get me through it all was my plan to recover afterwards on a ridiculously perfect beach. It was so chilly and wet at times that I needed my coat but I had a blissful time in Cornwall. It was number five on my list so this shows you how badly I wanted the holiday. It's so vital to have something to look forward to. I may be fighting a killer disease but I still need some hope in my life.
I used to be very sporty and I still crave that adrenalin rush so I picked a few things like sky diving and swimming with sharks just because they would terrify me. I haven't yet been brave enough to do those. But I have been driven very fast around a racetrack. A friend arranged for the ex-Formula 1 star David Coulthard to drive me around Silverstone. The speed was so exhilarating that I couldn't even scream to start with. It's funny how being scared to death can make you feel so alive.
One of the reasons I responded to my diagnosis with a bucket list was because of a book I'd recently read, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Bronnie Ware looked after terminally ill people in Australia. She realised that many of them shared the same concerns. For example, they wished they hadn't worked so hard and they'd allowed themselves to be happy. When I interviewed Bronnie for my documentary she told me that one of her favourite clients was a woman called Grace.
She always wanted to travel but didn't because of her husband. Her husband went into a nursing home because he was ill. She then became terminally ill within a few weeks of gaining the freedom that she had waited 50 or 60 years for.
So she actually never got to live any of those dreams and she insisted on me promising her that I would live a life true to myself," Bronnie explained. I'm glad that I don't have any big regrets. This is partly down to another bucket list that I made. Twelve years ago I was diagnosed with cancer for the very first time. While I was ill from the evil chemo cocktails I couldn't do anything but think about what I wanted to do once I was well again.
I came up with a list of 10 things. Within weeks of finishing treatment I was in Moscow, pursuing my dream of becoming a BBC foreign correspondent. I'm clearly a fan of bucket lists but I understand that they're not for everyone.
I wonder whether they create too much pressure to try to cram in everything? Psychotherapist Philippa Perry is worried that some people may have one for the wrong reasons. It reminds me too much of a consumer society. A shopping list of holidays and sights and sensations.
People often say in situations of dying or bereavement that they wish there were manuals to guide them on how they should be feeling. Perhaps the bucket list performs a normative role on what to do. An appointment with death, which after all is the one certainty we all have to confront, does tend to focus the mind on what it means to be alive. Earlier this year, the journalist and self-improvement writer Oliver Burkeman published a book entitled Four Thousand Weeks , which is roughly the life-expectancy for the average westerner.
While Burkeman wants us to appreciate the meaning of time, he has little time for the bucket-list approach, which he sees as just another form of stressful escapism. And where the exotic and extreme are industrially commodified and consumed like any other product.
At the same time as the world has shrunk, our experiential ambitions have radically expanded. A hundred years ago, only the most intrepid of travellers would have even considered visiting the Himalayas. I believe there is meaning.
Instead of building on what you already have, "to make a good life," she continues, "it's really an attempt to fill an existential void".
There's also an innate air of competition to bucket lists, of striving to best yourself — but also others. In some ways it's no surprise that they have risen in popularity in an age when we are all encouraged to brand ourselves, to treat our Facebook pages as a shop window for our achievement-rich lives.
Psychologist Linda Blair , who is writing a book called The Key to Calm, to help people deal with stress and anxiety, says chasing big experiences is worthwhile if you enjoy the whole process.
I'm all for that," she says. Could they be a useful way of dealing with the inevitability of death? Blair doesn't think so. People usually do this to ensure that there are things to look forward to, which means there are things that are still going to happen … My experience warns me that it's probably done in order to prevent thinking about death. I think it's a way of trying to generate some excitement. It's a distraction from the business of being human.
We don't all like swimming with dolphins but we are all made to connect to each other. That's the really fun thing to do before you die. Bucket lists: are they a good idea?
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