As with all my staff, I am required by the Healthcare Commission to present my entire employment history since I left school. Asking for references should be fun: I have worked for myself since 1968. My trainers and early employers have mostly gone to happy hunting grounds.

He was imprisoned for three and a half years. For the first month (he himself had no advance notice of how long it would be) he was in solitary confinement. The lights were kept on all night and he had no switch. The lavatory was inside the cell. One small bar of soap had to last a month. His only human contact was with eyes periodically peering through the hatch that also acted as the route for food. He had no change of clothes or bedding. Of course, as he said, things were much worse in the old days under the Soviets.

Is he just an alcoholic or is something else going on as well? I really do not know. The difficulty on this particular judgement is that I don’t know a man who does.

Last night I had seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. I don’t know when that last happened. I’m rather reassured that my bladder held out and that my friend Malachy won’t be getting my prostate in his surgical hands just yet.

I showed him one of my antiquarian books: the story of Princess Badoura with illustrations by Edmund Dulac. He was totally captivated. Now he wants to set up a bookshop. All I had intended for him was for him to appreciate one beautiful thing. Now he is behaving like me.

Cash flow projections look fine when I jot them down on a pad of paper at night. The computer operates in the cold light of day and produces figures such as peak borrowing requirements and I don’t like the look of that at all.

“It would be so nice if you just popped in.”

Yes, it might be – but Whitechapel isn’t exactly next door to South Kensington. Never mind. I shall.

The furniture looked fine in the spacious showroom but it was overpowering when it was all crammed into the sitting room.

“She won’t come to see you.”

Oh yes she will – if you (her father) get out of the way and if you stop paying for everything. She won’t have much choice.

I enjoy the TV programme in which entrepreneurs present projects to a group of investors. I watch the way the investors work and I respect their judgement. After all, it’s their own money they are talking about. They made it. They value it. They choose what to do with it.

We feel the same about PROMIS. We created it and we own all of it. We have steadily expanded and we continue to do so – but that means that periodically we have to raise money.

We have a number of options. Bringing in an equity partner, as in the TV show, doesn’t appeal. We have survived and grown for twenty years without selling any part of our business and that’s the way we intend to stay. Interestingly, an investment bank approached us (Robin, to be precise) last year and said they would like to buy in. We haven’t said no because it is always sensible to keep all our options open.

Or we could sell something in order to buy something else. I could sell my collections of antiquarian books and medieval manuscripts but the amount I would get for it wouldn’t cover the wages for one month. Anyway, I am fond of the books and manuscripts. I don’t think of them in financial terms. They are part of me.

We could sell a building – but why would we want to do so? If something isn’t working well we should surely be able to find a better use for it rather than lose it altogether.

So we come back to the clearing banks. We use two. A third one has just popped up, asking if they might look after our business and see if they could offer us better terms. I am not tempted at all: we get a good service from our existing bankers and I appreciate them. Even so, I’ll maintain the contact with the third simply because I know from previous experience that a change in manager can lead to a change in lending policy and I don’t want to go through that again.

Without mentioning the third bank (we don’t play games; they always rebound), we approached the first two. We showed them our accounts and management figures and our projections and gave them our reasons for believing that we would succeed. We didn’t need to remind them that we have run a successful business for twenty years: they know that. We didn’t need to tell them about recent increases in property values: they know that too. Nor did we need to talk about us being aware of unstablility in the national and international economy: they know far more than we do on that subject.

We let the business speak for itself and we got double what we anticipated and hoped for – and that is a shed load and we gave away no equity whatever. We weren’t asked to do so.

So what now? This, of course, is what one doesn’t see on the TV programme. We now have to make the investment work for us. It’s one thing having the money (or, more accurately, the borrowing capacity) but altogether another knowing how to spend it wisely.

I don’t want a new car nor a smarter one. I always buy second-hand and Volvo estates suit me fine. I don’t want a bigger house. If anything, we need a smaller one. I don’t want to invest in other people’s businesses. I have never owned stocks or shares and I have no intention of starting that gamble now. I don’t want anything: I’ve got enough.

We simply want to grow the business and keep ahead of the field in the services that we offer to our patients – but we know that if we do that too fast we will go bust. We didn’t build PROMIS in order to sell out to The Priory. We have great respect for them as a business – they are the brand leader – but that really would be the dragons’ den and we’re not going there.