I’d have told a racist cabbie to go fuck himself, but I was scared about being chucked out on the street at 2am.

I would take away fear.

I should have known that I might not like what my brain scan showed, just as I should have known that the symptoms of prostatism that were increasingly bothering me were just as likely to be caused by cancer as by the benign prostatic enlargement that happens in most men as they age. But I continued to think that illness happened to patients and not to doctors, even though I was now retired. Twenty months after I had my brain scanned, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. I had had typical symptoms for years, steadily getting worse, but it took me a long time before I could bring myself to ask for help. I thought I was being stoical when in reality I was being a coward. I simply couldn’t believe the diagnosis at first, so deeply ingrained was my denial.

I would become fitter younger. Because I would have been hotter younger!

A chihuahua giving you a cuddle.

I’ve dodged a couple of bullets in dodgy war zones, but I suspect the closest I’ve come to death was a reckless, drunken brush with a waltzer at a student funfair. It nearly chopped me in half.

My daughter talking to her friends even though I thought I’d disabled her devices.

Every offended interviewee who thought I was asking hard questions for some personal reason. It’s never personal.

I did a terrible job of fixing the downstairs loo once.

As devastatingly talented, gorgeous and wise, but I’m not betting on it.