Like many others, I won’t be looking back on 2024 as a year which was anything other than one to forget. Being a Cancerian I always like to evaluate whether a year has been good, bad or indifferent.
For me, there are few consolations to balance what has been a pretty disastrous year, whether I judge it in personal, career or health terms. The only bright point has been being offered this weekly column by The i Paper!
Since I turned 60 my health has become a running sore in my life.
It started 10 days after my birthday when I contrived to fall off the stage at Buxton Opera House into the orchestra pit – a 12-feet drop. I fell onto a cello case which slightly broke the fall. Shame it contained a cello made in 1708 worth £100,000. A shame also that it buggered, to use a medical term, both of my knees. They weren’t broken but they took months to mend and shattered my sense of balance.
Move forward 10 months and I fell over at the top of a Charing Cross Underground escalator, breaking my right hip while doing so. It was then that I was diagnosed with severe osteoporosis.
As part of my rehab I signed up with the local gym in Tunbridge Wells for a weekly hour-long session with a personal trainer. Aaron has done wonders with me and restored much of my sense of balance and strengthened my knees.
He’s also become a good friend. When he found out what I did for a living he started quizzing me about politics and the news. “So Margaret Thatcher, I’ve heard her name, but what did she do?” he asked, quizzically, one day. He’s 26 and was born eight years after she left power. So he gave me an idea.
Next week I complete the manuscript of a short biography of Thatcher, which will come out next June. It’s aimed at people who weren’t alive when she was in power. That’s one of the few good things to have emerged from 2024.
Perhaps the worst experience of the year came at the end of July when I was home alone one Saturday evening and was doubled up with acute stomach pains. I thought it was food poisoning and assumed it would pass, but it didn’t.
Two days later I went to A&E and found out I had a perforated gall bladder. If I’m honest, I had been feeling run down for many months, perhaps a year. Bile had clearly been leaking into my bloodstream for God knows how long. But the infection was too bad to have the gall bladder removed immediately.
I was off the radio for seven weeks. I began to realise what retirement would be like, and didn’t like it. When I returned to the airwaves it was as if I had reinvented myself. I felt completely rejuvenated, not least because I had lost a stone and a half in weight.
Fear not, the health problems haven’t finished yet. I am a type 2 diabetic. And a very bad one. I have developed severe eyesight issues which have warranted both laser treatment and injections, but that process is nearly at an end and has worked.
In May, I made the mad decision to try to stand in the general election, which meant quitting my LBC job after 14 years. It wasn’t to be. Someone found a clip from several years ago of me dissing Tunbridge Wells on my For the Many podcast. Tunbridge Wells is my home constituency and where I had planned to stand.
Given the seat was taken by the Lib Dems, I supposed I dodged a bullet, but it didn’t – and doesn’t – feel like that. It was utterly humiliating, but self-inflicted.
Three days later I was back at LBC. But it meant I wasn’t allowed to present their election night show, which I had done for the previous four general elections. I also got pulled from the American election night show, which was a huge disappointment.
Worse, the For the Many podcast ended after 500 episodes when my podcast partner and TV wife Jacqui Smith was appointed to the House of Lords and became a government minister. It was like losing a limb.
The end of the podcast also meant the end of my Friday morning appearances on Good Morning Britain with Jacqui. I assumed I would continue with a new onscreen partner, but it wasn’t to be. I was summarily dropped without even a goodbye or thank you. Such is the cruel world of TV. Still, seven years is a good stretch.
In 2013 my partner John and I bought a getaway house in a quiet Norfolk village, but last week we sold it. John was delighted, as he hated the journey from Tunbridge Wells. I was devastated as I loved the place, but frankly we weren’t going there enough to justify keeping it, so we’ve become second homeless. Get your violins out.
In so many ways I haven’t enjoyed the 2020s so far, but I still feel optimistic about 2025, even though January will probably see me getting a driving ban for totting the points up.
Most importantly, I’ve got a job I still love, I’ve had five books being published this year, I have a partner I love, a happy home life and two dogs who are my world. What’s not to like?
Iain Dale presents the Evening Show on LBC Radio, Monday to Thursday, 7-10pm
