I am who I am because of that messed-up childhood.

All the hanging about.

My education. Benedictine monks didn’t really prepare me for the life I have lived.

I would have been a better listener. I would have pursued more friendships instead of focusing so much on work and myself. I’m doing all that now, but I’m running out of time.

I worked in a cafe, which I loved, but when it was quiet we had to scrape the fat out from between the tiles on the floor with a butter knife.

When my first husband died, because it felt like my life was over, and it was challenging to keep in life at the time.

Listening to a song that my brother-in-law – the brother of Jason, my first husband – wrote, about how hard it was to live without his brother.

I remember being a teenager and writing this romantic short story in the style of the Brontës on a computer and I didn’t realise that the person whose computer it was could just print it out. A group of boys had a couple of pages and they were all reading it.

My mum, for the way that she brought up her three children and managed to make her money work. She worked as a cleaner for all these families we went to church with. She would cycle there with my little sister on the back of her bike – we didn’t have a car. She had an amazing mind for planning and organising so that we got to do ballet, we went to Brownies.

I’m not really ashamed, but I haven’t read Lord of the Rings.