I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning.

Swimming off the north Cornish coast eight years ago. I remember thinking, “Why did they teach you how to inflate your pyjamas in life-saving classes at school, when they could have just told you what to do in a riptide?”

I’ve been asleep at the wheel on the M11, had an engine fire over the Atlantic in a light aircraft, driven unprotected through an enemy firing zone to do a gig in wartime Sarajevo – the list goes on and on. But I did have stage 3 throat cancer and was cured by some fantastic UK medics.

A piece of scenery fell on my head during Richard II at the Globe theatre in 2019. I was very badly hurt.

A warm blanket.

When I was 15, I conned my way into an office job at a company that represented makers of breast implants. The manager had a wart on the end of her tongue that she’d push against her teeth, making a very specific sound.

I wouldn’t have taken that meeting [with Weinstein in 1997].

Waking people up.

The trans community because I didn’t use the correct words, but I’ve learned from my mistake.

A mortician – I worked in a funeral home when I was 14.