Bishop of Swindon: A stranger's sneeze could kill me - but I still think of my lymphoma as a gift So the bishop has been told he must stay away from crowds, or even people with snuffles, until at least the new year. This has halted his public ministry and put him under a kind of house arrest, although he still manages to smile when describing it. Unclean! Unclean!" he says, waving an imaginary plague bell. I have to control my interactions. I am low on white blood cells. I'm rattling because I'm taking so many pills - anti-fungal pills, antibacterial pills, antiviral pills - but it only takes one person to sneeze over me or something. He has seen what can happen. A few years ago, an archdeacon was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. He was doing really well, then he got the flu. He died within a few days. That's how serious this is. Not that the bishop is asking for sympathy or special treatment. As a former hospital doctor, he knows that many other people go through this, and worse. If I were an immunologist still, frankly, it would be my own business. I'd just disappear," he says. But when you are a public figure in the way that a bishop is, you have to let people know that you will not be able to do the things they are expecting of you, like turning up to this event or taking that service. I have to tell them why. Some people might be cagey about it, but I think it's better to be straightforward. That's why he chose to write about his cancer on Twitter and his blog, provoking a response that he finds overwhelming. I'm wrapped around by people's care. I've been getting so many cards, emails, messages. I feel massively loved, Cole. Millions of people heard about his situation last month, when the BBC radio presenter Simon Mayo read out a letter from the bishop on air, his voice cracking as he struggled to reach the end. It was a personal thank-you to Mayo and the critic Mark Kermode for their film review show on Radio 5 Live, which had prompted the ailing bishop to take a risk. "I was listening to their movie reviews while I was having my sandwiches and they were talking about Rush, the film about James Hunt and Nicky Lauda," he says. I said to my wife and daughter, 'I would so love to see it at the cinema, but how can I? I'm not allowed to go to places like that."" He was due to have chemotherapy the next day and knew he would not be able to sleep at night - "the steroid pre-med acts like intravenous Red Bull" - so he mused about stealing away to some late-night screening in an empty cinema. His 18-year-old daughter Louise took him at face value, searched online and booked the tickets. It was lovely to go with her. There were only six of us in the whole cinema, so I could sit right over in the corner, away from everyone else, with my alcohol squirt. He found the end of the film so moving that he applauded the credits all on his own, to his daughter's embarrassment. Lauda is burned to bits by this crash but his rivalry with Hunt drives him to have his lungs vacuumed, not just once - but twice. It's because he is so passionate to beat this guy. One of the doctors says to him, 'Your enemy turned out to be your friend."" That set the bishop thinking about his own condition, and how a blessing might come from a curse, and in the sleepless night he wrote the thank-you: "I have tried to look for the gift in what has happened, and this was a perfect example. I cannot imagine [otherwise] ever making the time midweek to go to a late show like this with my daughter... thank you both for blessing me with your review. His calm, controlled, slightly detached way of talking about all this would be a surprise, except that Lee Rayfield was like that when we first met in the early Nineties. He came to be a curate in my father-in-law's church but he still had a doctor's bedside manner (as well as a moustache that made him look like the young Peter Bowles). The next we heard of him was in 2001, when his face was all over the papers. He groans at the mention of this, and calls it Santagate. That was a very painful time in my life. It was humiliating. Speaking at a carol service in his new parish, he said it was scientifically impossible for Santa Claus to exist, and that the reindeers would burst into flames if they travelled at those kinds of speeds. Unfortunately, the congregation was younger than he had been led to believe. There was outrage, and the headline: "Vicar Tells Children Santa is Dead." He told the BBC: "I did not realise how young some of them were, and I am sitting here now wondering how I managed not to realise. I am mortified and appreciate I have put some parents in a difficult position, with a lot of explaining to do. I love Christmas. The Church authorities were impressed by the calm way he dealt with being doorstepped, and his full and frank apology. He was promoted not long afterwards, and became Bishop of Swindon in 2006. He was on the UK Gene Therapy Advisory Committee at the time, and is now a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. "I can carry on with a lot of that work from here," he says in the living room of his large, modern house on the edge of Swindon. He's wearing a white clerical shirt and dog collar, with his silver pectoral cross tucked into the breast pocket. Known as one of the fittest and most active of bishops, he took a copy of Cycling Plus magazine to read at the hospital in September, when he went for the results of a biopsy on a lump on his neck. It fell open at a story about a guy called Geoff Thomas who was a professional footballer diagnosed with leukaemia. God spoke to me through that. No sooner had I read it than the door opened. I was ready. I knew I was going to hear bad news. I was prepared. Incredibly, he was then partly relieved. My first reaction was: 'Oh no, it's lymphoma. My second reaction was, 'Yes! It's Hodgkin. If you are going to have a lymphoma, you want it to be this one. It is so much better understood - the prognosis is better. The hardest thing was telling his three children, who are aged between 22 and 29. When I told them, it was a pretty heavy atmosphere. My eldest, Matt, took it deeply. It was hard to see that. It is quite painful, telling people that love you that this is the situation. I felt it for my children, but particularly for Matt and for Jade, our daughter-in-law, whom I love dearly. I have to ask, why doesn't his loving, all-powerful God just heal him? Hopefully I am being healed. In the process of the healing, which is largely being done by chemotherapy and some very skilful physicians, I am also finding healing, in that my spiritual horizons are growing, I am deepening as a person through this experience. Faith is no longer hypothetical. Do you know the film Touching the Void? The guy who was cut from the rope and fell didn't pray, because he just knew he didn't believe in anything. That is not how it is for me. I have a fragile, limited faith with loads of questions, but this is not a fall into the unknown. As a Christian... well, the play-acting is over, isn't it? When hope is put to the test, you either have it or you don't. I am finding that I do. And when I leave, he shakes my hand again.