A temp job at BT. I still have nightmares about ADSL lines. I still don’t know what one is. I would find myself on national conference calls being questioned about ADSL lines and told that the problem was in London. I would try not to breathe so they would forget I was there.

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.

When I was at school, I had a summer job where I had to buff blocks of plastic for a display unit. The factory only remembered to give us masks on day three.

Being a cocktail waitress and having to wear a compromising dress in an unwoke 1990s world.

Arrogance, bullying, meanness – just try to be kind, it’s not difficult.

Going to pieces while meeting John Squire, the lead guitarist of the Stone Roses, backstage after a gig. I completely lost the ability to speak. I told him I had the same guitars as he’d just used on stage, and when he asked me which ones, the words completely went out of my head and there was a huge pause, and then his wife tapped his shoulder and he wandered off.

Outliving my kids – and rats.

Live in the moment. Enjoy life because time cruelly speeds up as you get older and becomes scarily finite.

After the birth of both my children, although Manchester United winning the treble in 1999 came pretty close.

A couple of years ago we moved to East Sussex – I had been living in London for 35 years – and couldn’t work out why I kept waking up and thinking, what’s that sound? It was actually silence.