Dame Felicity Lott has revealed that doctors have given her a terminal cancer diagnosis, and the 79-year-old singer says she is now making arrangements for her own care. Lott said she had known she was ill for almost a year before speaking publicly about the diagnosis, and that she is trying to keep enjoying herself.

“I’m just so happy at the moment. I don’t want anybody to be sad because I'm having a ball. I can’t understand it, because I’m not very well,” she said. The treatment she is receiving includes steroids, which she said have given her more energy than ever, even as doctors have told her she must now plan for hospice care.

The disclosure carries unusual weight because Lott was already thinking about how to help others before she learned how serious her own condition was. She had contacted a chief fundraiser about auctioning couture gowns from her concert wardrobe for a local hospice group, only for that idea to collide, within weeks, with the news that she was planning her own admission to one of the hospice centres.

Lott said the turn of events felt “quite ironic, really”, adding that when she first got in touch, she thought the dresses might be sold to aid hospices. “Then, blow me, you get signed up to the hospice yourself,” she said. She described the experience as “a daft move” in the sense that life had taken her from giving to hospice care to needing it herself.

The singer is still planning a charity sale in October in aid of hospices in Sussex, using a collection of designer dresses she bought in Paris rather than taking loans from fashion houses. That wardrobe has long been part of her public life: Lott had assembled couture outfits for concert appearances, including for a performance at the Last Night of the Proms in 1996.

Born and brought up in Cheltenham, Lott has spent decades on the international stage. She made her celebrated debut as Pamina in The Magic Flute at the London Coliseum in 1975, was made a dame in 1996 and is also a recipient of the Légion d’honneur. Now, after nearly a year living with the diagnosis, she says she has had time to look back with gratitude on a life that took her “all over the world.”

What happens next is already set in motion: the October sale goes ahead, and the singer continues planning the care she has been told she now needs. For Lott, the story is no longer about a diagnosis kept private. It is about how she intends to live with it.