I’m much much closer to my children than my father was to me, and I would hope that the quality of love I’ve given them is different from the quality my father gave me.

I’ve never been this close with anyone, or spent this much time with any other person in my life. We talk talk talk so openly about everything, and do everything together. He’s definitely the love of my life.

We always tried to share experiences with them. It was a little more difficult for them after the astronaut business, but they’ve responded well. All three are happily married, with their youngsters. And they’re not just happy homemakers. They’re all involved in little projects of their own, because they are challenged by wanting to help local charities, or wanting to start a business. I think they have turned out reasonably well.

Yeah, I try to make sure Sundays I’m about and present. This weekend he wants to do an apple crumble. We’ll normally do some sort of slow roasting in the morning because we’ll be off to rugby training, and then the afternoon when we get back, it’s all cooked and lovely.

I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.

And into the darkness I said, “What happened?” and a woman’s voice said, “It was a car bomb,” and I collapsed into darkness again, but with a sense of euphoria. I’d survived.

I was part of a very big ANC team, and I worked very, very closely with Oliver Tambo, who was the president of the ANC in exile, who had an enormous influence in my life.

Love, in so many different manifestations... normally a calm feeling, an intense and rich feeling that is based on a very beautiful emotion of connection with people, and space on earth, and in the world. Love, and respect, and admiration, and appreciation, these things flow easily into eachother.

I think of two great personalities who were locked up in the prison where we’ve now built the Constitutional Court: Gandhi and Mandela.

We haven’t crossed the frontier of unemployment, of poverty, of dispossession, of landlessness, of homelessness, of lack of access to health, to education, all those different things. We just have to keep going steadily, steadily, to plan well, to involve the people and not simply deliver things from the top and hope that people will be grateful, and get upset when they’re not grateful.