Worrying about the faux pas I made earlier that evening. I tend to suffer from foot-in-mouth disease.

Thinking about all the worst possible things: losing people, dying, how am I going to die? All that sort of stuff. I stay awake thinking about furniture and shoes as well. It’s not all death.

Hormones – other than that, I sleep like a rock.

The children. As a mother you are constantly worrying whether you’ve done the right thing.

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

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 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.

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.

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

My mum looks after our kids all the time, but on the very few weeks she takes time off, doing it all is a big juggle. My mum is a combination of Mary Poppins and Angela Davis, so I’d clone her.