I remember seeing a close-up of an elegant lady who had lost her entire family, and the eyes of this woman - black, haunted, hopeless - just got to me. I knew what it was like to stare into the abyss. And in his garden in south London, the lavender bushes blow in a soft wind and we all sit and wait. Mother courage Carol Grey (left, main picture), aged 51, was a housewife, living with her husband and seven children on the outskirts of Sheffield until the war in Bosnia. A committed Mormon, she now divides her time between home and organising aid convoys to Bosnia's mountainous frontline. I have my work." What then, if anything, does it hurt to leave behind? "My garden," he says slowly.Outside the window, the harsh wind is sucking up the sand and the dirt, and the ibises are flying home to roost in the tall eucalyptus trees "That could be the thing I miss the most," he adds.

He is, indeed, all smiles, radiating charm and attentiveness to a seraglio of young women from Waterstones who have been lunching him to celebrate a new role. He is to preside over an initiative by the Terence Higgins Trust, the Aids charity, in setting up and judging a writing competition called "It Must be Love" with the bookselling chain. Why did he think they'd asked him? "Because I'm on the telly." But so is Des Lynam and they didn't ask him "Yeah, I wasn't at all sure about it. I knew the papers would be full of, you know, "Virus Behaving Badly" and "Men Behaving Terence-Higginly", and they said they didn't mind." Becoming a charity celeb is something new for Clunes, whose previous philanthropic work has been confined to the Born Free Foundation (about saving lion cubs), run by Virginia McKenna, whom he directed in his 1994 movie, Staggered. To set up a viable TB programme and make it stick: it's more worthwhile."Than what? Being with your family, your home, your life? He is irritatingly impossible to rattle "I have you all here with me I have the hospital. Who can say whether what you do is for yourself or for some greater need? Is it better to go or to stay? I came to the conclusion it was better to go. It's a risk, but it's a good time to take a risk."To which my mother, far away, says, "I'm looking forward to having our retirement years together.

I'm just deferring it for a few years."Perhaps when you've wanted to do something from the age of seven, giving up simply isn't an option. Perhaps it postpones the realities of age, which doctors see all too clearly before them."Everyone worries about getting old," says my father in his familiar, comforting manner, the way he spoke when I failed my French O-Level and he told me that he had failed his, too "I'm not trying to hide that I just think this is a more worthwhile thing to try. Lamps, strung up on cables, swing gently between the trees."It's better than shutting oneself up in an old people's home," he ruminates later "Yes, what I'm doing is selfish Perhaps. Chilly sunshine pours down from a bright, blue sky, hitting the brown, fronded leaves of the jacaranda trees. Then: "My God! There goes a cockroach!" he says suddenly, laughing as the insect marches doggedly across the wall Outside, it's a typical, South African winter's day. The lungs in the photograph look foggy, with thin, white webs; but the delicate dance of clavicle and collar-bone still stand out, framing the diseased chest with elegant curves."You can see here the high bronchial tumour," starts my father, pointing with his pen.