But then Dragons’ Den arrived. I decided filming a single series wouldn’t work as I’d need two series to establish myself as a dragon, so we delayed our plans for another year and by the summer of 2016 we’d downsized our businesses, rented out our home and were ready to travel. 

I wanted only one thing from our trip: to bottle time. If I had one superpower, it would be to press pause around me, to just take it all in rather than live life in a blur. I wanted to punctuate our lives with something amazing that we’d all remember forever, and that’s exactly what happened – although things didn’t go exactly to plan. 

As a lifelong adrenaline junkie, we were away for six months before that constant inertia – that energy I was so used to in my day-to-day working life – finally dissipated, and that was when I finally started to live. I slowed down. I breathed deeper and I forged a remarkable new relationship with nature. 

We flew into Vancouver and spent some time in British Columbia, then Seattle, then travelled all the way down America’s west coast to San Diego, and that’s when we almost had to abandon everything. 

In LA, nine weeks into our trip, Michael got really ill, and was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. We were told it had spread into his lymphs and he quickly decided he wanted to have treatment in the UK. So back we went. Then, just a week before the children were due to go back to their British schools, and a week before Michael’s chemotherapy was planned to begin, another cancer specialist did some more tests, and discovered that Michael had diverticulitis – not colon cancer. He still had to have a foot of rotten, infected, inflamed colon removed, but he didn’t have cancer.