About five years ago, I was in a play that was an unmitigated disaster. I had to rally the troops and go out every night.

I was a secret shopper and had to do a lot of bookies – Coral and William Hill – all around London. For 18-year-old me looking all fab it was quite scary going in and saying: “Hiya, can I put £4 on No 7 horse, please?” But you got to keep the money when you won.

There was a period in the early 2000s when I had been doing celebrity profiles and thought I’d lost my way creatively.

I worked on a trawler and I was seasick the whole time.

All the big ones – climate change, safety for our children, money.

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

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.

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.

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.