When I heard John Noakes had died.

I have wet eyes sometimes, but I cried all my tears in my youth.

On stage. It was cathartic. It takes a lot for me to cry in real life.

Walking along Oxford Street on Saturday pulling a shopping trolley that my mother bought me. I remember saying, “I’m never going to use that!” and there I was, very grateful to have it in my life. She died before Christmas and I can’t ring her to tell her that she was right.

I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.

I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.

When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.

That I still don’t understand life. When I was young, I thought at some point I would find somebody who does. I am 45, and there is a good chance that I’ll never meet somebody like that.

On a personal level, the friend who is a single mum raising two kids by herself during this Covid era. She is a real hero. If a historical personality, I choose Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably saved the world from world war three.

Now. I’ve learned to adjust my expectations to reality better than when I was 20 or 10.