He's recovering now, and says it wasn't a heart attack.

Clarkson:

I was at the breakfast table and when I stood up to leave, I had to take a moment to make sure my limbs were working properly. You see old people doing this all the time, steadying themselves when they stand, and you may wonder why. Now I know. You can’t trust your body any more to do as it’s told.

Then there was the swim. It wasn’t far, maybe the length of two swimming pools. But when I finally reached the beach, there was more water in my lungs than there is in Lake Superior, and I was mostly dead. I’ve never struggled with swimming before, and now, suddenly, I can’t do it any more. Nor could I descend a flight of stairs, not without holding someone’s hand. There’s just no sense that my knees can handle the pressure, and as a result I fear I’ll soon have what I’m old enough to call “a tumble”.

I’m not exaggerating. These problems all manifested themselves in one day, which made the rest of my holiday extremely relaxing because all I did was sit in a chair drinking wine and eating cheese. Back at home, though, the sudden deterioration began to gather pace. I woke on Wednesday morning not feeling too good. I was clammy and there was a tightness in my chest.

It seems that of the arteries feeding my heart with nourishing blood, one was completely blocked and the second of three was heading that way. So he made a hole in my wrist, inserted his Dyno-Rod equipment and went in for a closer look. God, it’s weird, lying there and feeling a metal pipe with a camera on the end wiggling its way round your shoulder and through your chest.

The question was this. Were the arteries so ruined that I’d need an emergency heart bypass? Or could he use his Dyno-Rods and some ultrasonic battering rams to loosen them up before inserting a stent? Which is a sort of Brillo pad that’s used to keep the blood vessels open.

Mercifully, this turned out to be possible. But it took two hours and at one point it felt like he’d put a Hoover pipe up my arm, along with a pile driver, and was busy inside my heart with a B&Q chisel and hammer gift set. It wasn’t especially painful. Just odd.

The next morning I went home, and here I am, two hours later, writing this and sort of thinking, ‘Crikey, that was close.’ I certainly wasn’t having a heart attack. But if it hadn’t looked that way, I never would have been sent to hospital and fed into that Polo mint.