Last year, driving in California, I found myself on the wrong side of the road. I was 30 seconds away from hitting two cars coming the other way.

I’m getting closer all the time.

When I rode on the back of a motorbike from London to Rome with my eyes closed the entire way.

We used to have one of those gat guns that shot pellets. My friend pretty much had the thing at point-blank range to my temple. It popped out and completed its trajectory about a millimetre from my head.

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.

I wouldn’t change anything. When I was 29, my first husband died, so I learned a new way of thinking about life, which is: there are many things that you can’t control.

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.

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.