Having to clean out my daughter’s digs at university. The memory of the state of that toilet still lives with me.

Working in a bottle factory, which lasted one day, and the Radio 1 breakfast show.

Working in a call centre in Cardiff for British Gas. I was 21 and, I am ashamed to say, one Monday morning I ran away. I said I was going to the loo and never went back.

Magician’s assistant on a cruise ship for two weeks when I was 19. When I was meant to be being levitated, I was silently crying while pretending to be unconscious as I hung limply off a metal pole. It was bleak.

I would have behaved better to my first wife, and the girl I lived with afterwards. I was always away.

I’d like to say sorry to my mother. I had to choose between my parents, and I chose my father because he didn’t have any other kids. (My mother was a war widow and had two children from her first marriage.) I thought, in a childish way, that one had to be fair. It was very difficult for my mother and me, and we never really got over it.

Recently, when I got out of hospital and into my own bed with my wife and 10-year-old son; we watched some crap television and life had never seemed better.

The problem with my job is that you meet people you admire and then you don’t admire them so much. The only one I carried on admiring was Nelson Mandela.

Comfort, warmth and security.