The long way home

Struck down by Covid-19 earlier this year, Robin Hanbury-Tenison spent five weeks in a coma and was close to death. Now, he is valiantly fundraising for more of the healing hospital gardens he believes helped save him

- Robin Hanbury-Tenison

IN February this year, I published my latest book, Taming the Four Horsemen—about the imminent threats we face and my rather radical proposals as to how to deal with them—with a big party at Stanfords in London’s Covent Garden. The major menaces of pandemics, war, famine and the death of the planet are listed on the cover and, on page four, I write: ‘There is little doubt that we face a major global pandemic before long.’ I go on to say how research into the infinite world of microbes and viruses is urgently needed if we are to avoid a pandemic and how much more valuable this would be than spending vast amounts on striving to reach outer space.

Then, in March, we went skiing in France. I was skiing pretty well, I thought, for a man in his eighties, but, on the last day, I felt a bit knackered. By the time we arrived back at our home on Bodmin Moor, I was exhausted. An ambulance came and whisked me off to Derriford hospital in Plymouth, where I was told that I had a choice: to stay in the comfortable admission ward and almost certainly die or to be taken down to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where horrible things would be done to me, but I would have a 20% chance of survival.