A sushi chef in my kitchen.

Decent arts funding.

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

I would love more horses.

Meeting Richard Ratcliffe outside the Foreign Office during his hunger strike to try to get action to free Nazanin. I’m moved by the loyalty and strength of that couple and their family.

On stage, interviewing one of my heroes, Paul McCartney, at the Royal Festival Hall last November.

When I was a 26-year-old news correspondent, the head of BBC news gathering, Chris Cramer, refused to let me take up a six-month attachment on the foreign affairs programme Correspondent. He said: “I think it’s too soon; you could do it later.” He’d never have said that to a man.

My maternal grandmother, who lived with us for many years. I was a moody teenager and sometimes impatient and rude. Yet she was the person I feel I’m most like. I really miss her.