Seizures are unpredictable and can lead to dangerous outcomes

On 5 June this year, on a beach near Cannes, surrounded by my nearest and dearest, the day after the wedding of my younger daughter Flora, I had a fit. There was no warning, no lights flashing, no headaches, no out- of-body feelings. I just suddenly started having a violent seizure.

My limbs thrashed about, my face turned blue and then white. Blood came from my mouth, where I had bitten my lip. Not that I knew any of this at the time, as I'd passed out. I woke up about 20 minutes later in an ambulance, racing through the back streets of Cannes.

Looking back, I was so lucky that it happened in a fairly safe place, on a sandy beach where I couldn't do myself much damage and with lots of people around. It could very easily have happened when I'd swum out to a raft on my own, and presumably would have drowned.

Or two days earlier when I was bombing down the A1 at 80mph on the way to Newcastle airport. Each year, there are 1,000 seizure-related deaths - half of them the result of drowning or injury after the seizure itself.