Giving a speech in high school at a pep rally that wasn’t going so well and the dean unplugged the mic. Apparently, I was rambling and the spirit of the cafeteria was being weighed down.

Fifteen years ago, I totally forgot my lines on stage and was mortified. We skipped two pages of dialogue and took three minutes off the play – to the delight of the audience!

On radio, I once said “anal” instead of “angel”.

When I was appointed director of public prosecutions, I had a government car and visited the security services. When I came out, I got into the back of what I thought was my car, but it was somebody’s private car and they told me in no uncertain terms to get out. I had to reverse out with as much dignity as I could, with the head of security services watching.

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 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.

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.

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.

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