Helping to slaughter farmyard animals as a kid; watching while my aunties cut them up to get their guts out and seeing eggs floating around in the hens. That made me become a vegetarian.

I worked a janitorial job, cleaning university dormitories after students had gone home for the summer. You can’t imagine the condition some of those rooms were in. They could have doubled as sets for a slasher film.

A 12-hour nightshift at a toy factory in Southend.

When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.

Being alive on Earth is challenging and I like to believe that whatever happens after is filled with peace and ease.

In my 20s I was in a show called The Unauthorised Autobiography of Samantha Brown. The actor who played my dad messed up his lines and it made me laugh so hard that I ended up peeing my pants.

Curious, thoughtful and kind.

A blood clot in my artery when I was 23.

An inability to be authentic.

I had a casting director once stop me in the middle of an audition and tell me to go wash my face in the bathroom because she felt my makeup was too distracting, but I wasn’t wearing any. It was mortifying. It felt like a power play and I was so young, I didn’t know what to do.