Why I hate Valentine's Day...

Red is certainly the colour of my Valentine’s, but not the red of red, red roses. No, it’s blood pooling around me… and every drop of it mine.

I still find it impossible to make sense of it in any way (and probably there is no sense), but I was so very nearly my very own Valentine’s Day massacre six years ago.

How quickly everything can change.

"I saw all the blood and was convinced I was going to die"

In a moment, I was immeasurably damaged – though, as I see it now, in that moment I was also immeasurably enriched.

On St Valentine’s Day 2016, I was stabbed, kicked and stamped on in a ghastly suburb of Cape Town that I was beyond naïve to have been walking through.

I’d had a fantastic day watching England lose a one-day international at the astonishingly beautiful Newlands Cricket Ground.

I made no preparations for getting back to central Cape Town and decided, to prolong the fun of it all, that I would walk the seven miles.

Insane. Unbelievably stupid. Not something I would do now. But back then I was a very different person.

Oddly, for years afterwards I worried that people would be saying “Oh, Phil…. He was never the same again after what happened to him in Cape Town.”

Now I suspect that outwardly I haven’t changed much at all, except to become a considerably more twitchy, vastly more jumpy version of myself.

But I know inside that I am someone very different, someone whose thoughts and values have been completely rewritten by that day.

By one of life’s great ironies, on February 14 2016, though I didn’t know it, my wife Fiona had bought me – for Valentine’s Day – a beautiful posterised version of the lyrics to The Beatles’ In My Life, surely one of the most remarkable songs ever written – remarkable to an extent because it was written by a 24-year-old.

How on earth did Lennon manage to write with such maturity, such equanimity, such wisdom… at just 24 years old.

And just how much did those words resonate when I got back home.

“All these places have their moments

With lovers and friends I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living

In my life I've loved them all”

It chills me now just to think about it. How apt those words so very nearly were.

I was stricken on the pavement, absolutely couldn’t move, was starting to lose vision – and all I wanted to do was to shut my eyes. Effectively I was on my way out.

Thank heavens for the pizza delivery driver who happened to be passing, who pulled up in this dangerous, desolate place and who saved my life. What an absolute hero.

18 stitches, two deep stab wounds, three broken ribs, defensive wounds to my hand and completely black and blue all over.

It’s a tale I tell in my book Outrunning The Demons available by clicking here – a book which details just how much running has helped me since.

But oddly, it was only very recently that I had a conversation about my adventures that really gave me understanding in a way I had never expected. I was with a walking mate tramping the South Downs. He is a solicitor.

I asked him what the charge would have been had the guy been caught (he wasn’t). My friend answered “attempted murder.”

The thought freaks me, but it is also an encouragement. It says “Hey, of course you can feel overwhelmed by what happened.”

It’s what I see when I close my eyes. I am on that pavement. It is happening now. It is not a memory. I think about it far too much. I talk about it far too much.

But those words “attempted murder” are a vital context – the perfect riposte to my usual self-battering thoughts of “What are you worrying about? You are still here!”

So it’s a permission – a confirmation of a strange and rather wonderful situation. I was on the wrong end of an attempted murder, and yet I am still alive. However hard things are (PTSD is absolutely ghastly, take my word for it), I am still in the land of the living.

And that’s why – even amidst the persistent, enervating difficulties – life is good.

For a while, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones and one of my gods, used to say on stage with wonderful comic timing: “It’s good to be here… It’s good to be anywhere!”

It feels a bit like that.

My memory for names is now poor. My sleep is abysmal. My concentration isn’t great either.

And I am ludicrously jumpy. I leap out of my skin at noises behind me – and oddly it’s even worse with noises either side of me, those peripheral points. And it is exhausting. And very, very embarrassing.

It’s called hypervigilance, but the upside is that with hypervigilance comes hyper-appreciation, I’d like to think.

If someone sticks a knife in you a couple of times and attempts to kick the living daylights out of you, then one thing is for sure if you survive: you will emerge with a rather more robust estimation of what actually matters in life and what really, really doesn’t.

My wife’s love and support throughout have been heroic – and humbling. I keep thinking that I really, really wouldn’t want to live with a jumpy old git like me. And yet she does so with grace and love every day.

And my children…

Adam was a second-year medic when I was stabbed. Laura was in the middle of applying to medical school.

Adam qualified as a doctor in July 2019 and spent the first year of the pandemic on A&E in Newcastle.

Laura qualified as a doctor in July 2021 and is currently working on acute medical admissions.

Just phenomenal.

I am bursting with pride.

And of course, I would have been hugely proud of the two of them even if I hadn’t been stabbed.

But there is something very lovely about the thought that that pride now runs through every single cell of my body.

Life is pretty fragile, isn’t it. And Adam and Laura are preserving it.

When you have spent a minute or so lying in your own blood convinced that within a couple of minutes you will be dead, if you manage to get out of it then inevitably there is a glorious Technicolor to all the good things in life thereafter.

I am not pleased that it happened. But I have never wished that it hadn’t happened.

The difficult things in life have been become infinitely more difficult, but the great things have been far, far greater than they would have been.

Margaret Thatcher (and I would never quote her for anything else) once famously said: “It just occurred to me that this is the day I was not meant to see.”

I know what she means.

But no, I am not sure I will ever feel quite the same about St Valentine’s Day…

Culture Spark set to ignite Chichester district arts and community celebration

Celebrating one of Britain’s most beloved performers, Dame Vera Lynn

A book about loss and hope

A remarkable tale of recovery from a rare form of cancer

New book inspired by days out with the family