I met a foot fetishist once. We spent a pleasant evening without a single mention of heels or toes, but the next day he telephoned a mutual friend enquiring about the size of my feet Alas (for him and for me) they are quite large Well, they have always been feet requiring sensible shoes High heels are not sensible, but they are glorious Even I, at 6ft 2 with size 41 feet, own a pair They are by Stephane Kelian and I bought them ten years ago. "You know, I have lived, and continue to live, the life of Reilly I have, all my life I have never clocked in, never said 'yes, sir' I don't wake up feeling miserable I do whatever I fucking well want every day of my life I always have - and it isn't the money. The new plan is to build another mansion from a barn half a mile up the road. He has already planted beside it a maze spelling the name "Oz", with the "O" as the centre. "This", he says, gesturing round the old manor, "is going to be my day-house." The two will be linked by the gardens and woods he is creating.Is he happy? Today, at least, it seems that you could spend hours with him and never really get to grips with what he is about "Oh, what a question," he explodes, slapping his thigh "People always want me to say I am miserable I am not miserable!" He is shouting.

Now he describes what's left of his life as "bonus time".He says he has grown tired of the manor and all the houses in the village he has bought for guests, and moans that he never gets any peace. You obviously smoke, you drink like a fish, and probably take illegal drugs. You have contracted legionella and, if you go to sleep, you are probably going to die." He stayed awake. "You're looking", he explains, "at the only survivor of Legionnaires disease you will ever see." He caught it in America, in 1989.

He remembers the doctor in Connecticut who saved his life continually shaking him and saying: "It's really simple You're over 40 years old. But he knows a revolution when he sees one.Beyond his study window, the Vale of Evesham rolls off towards the Cotswolds. There is a whisper among his friends that, as well as building a large estate - he buys anything that moves around Dorsington, then hands it over to the farming family running it all for him - he also wants to build his own mausoleum, a strangely morbid aim for someone not yet 50 Intimations of mortality? Perhaps He has already had one dice with death. The irony is, he doesn't much like computers, and has never been that computer- literate. Great, but where's the portability? You have to be plugged in to use it.

That will all come, says Dennis, excited as a kid with a new trainset, and, when it does, his company will be at the forefront. "It will knock your socks off."The disc has five hours of interactive TV, with pop features, movie reviews and star profiles. You flick from one to another, and it talks, it moves, it sings. "Wait till you see this," he continues, and switches on his AppleMac. "My guiding principle is, 'I know a man who can', and I let them get on with it," he says cheerfully.Right now he is occupied with Blender, Britain's first CD-Rom only magazine "It's sensational," he says, leading me up to his study Halfway there, he taps an oil painting of a bullock "Vermeer," he says, waggling his eyebrows Funny - surely Vermeer never painted cattle. He told a recent, fawning Central TV documentary that the secret of his success was easy to encapsulate: "Dear Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz! My friends all drive Porsches..." So what does he do all day? He spends a few days in the country, a few in town, a week in America, keeping an eye on his businesses.

His father did try to contact him, much later, when he was older, but he rebuffed him. He also put his mum through quite a lot - expulsions, academic failure, dropping out - while his brother was the complete opposite, very quiet and straight; he became a master lens grinder, but currently works for his big brother.Dennis ducks and dives when he's asked what now motivates him. The thought of another budding musician must have given his mother the shivers, he says. His father, a jazz pianist and bomber navigator in the War, had left for Australia when he was three. So one night, after his mother had gone to bed, he says he sneaked the records on to the radiogram.