For two weeks I worked behind the players’ bar at Bolton Wanderers football club – footballers don’t tip.

I’ve never had a job.

Picking up RAF pilots’ parachute packs and gear they dropped off in a pile.

Cleaning toilets at McDonald’s when I was 16.

When I was seven I wanted to be a nun. When I was eight, I wanted to be a boy so that I could be anything I wanted. Also, of course, I wanted to be Samantha in Bewitched.

I was not great with my mother-in-law, who was a very gentle woman. I thought she would be an uninvited part of my life for ever, but she died early and I wished I had been more open and patient.

When Kellie Harrington won gold for Ireland in the boxing at the Paris Olympics I pumped out the briny.

Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not ­counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

Catherine Corless, who spent her own money to secure birth certificates for the unrecorded dead children of the Tuam mother and baby home.

I find it really interesting the way people are drawn to power, usually male power, sometimes in its dark mode. I wonder what they get from it. My experience of bastards is that there is very little material benefit gained from being in their company, though you feel there might be, any minute. Or you get something for a while and then the polarity switches. It’s a huge con. Trump made the mechanism clear – in this, I think he is a timely figure.