Boycott: staying alive is all that matters

In a typically candid interview with Olga Craig in The Sunday Telegraph, a mellower Geoffrey Boycott looks back to his time with cancer, and surviving the disease which takes so many lives.

For Boycott, now 67 and once one of England's greatest batsmen, was one of the lucky ones. Three months ago, in May, he was given the all-clear: the aggressive, fast-growing tumour on his tongue has gone and his prognosis is good.

''Which it wasn't when I was diagnosed,'' he says, gazing across the calm blue sea off the shore of Jersey, where Boycott now lives with wife Rachel. He doesn't speak. When he does, there is a fleeting glimpse of his struggle to keep a quiver from his voice. He had discovered a lump in his neck while shaving and in September 2002 Boycott's doctor told him it was cancer. Boycott, ever blunt, asked what would happen if he did nothing. ''The doc said: 'I'd give you three months, till just after Christmas.'

''Doesn't leave a lot of time, does it?'' Boycott says dryly, as he sets a yellow capsule, legacy of his treatment, on the table before him and pours a glass of mineral water. ''No saliva glands left,'' he explains.