I sent off the letter. I probably made a technical mistake by giving it to a journalist before hearing from the Prime Minister because this journalist was working for a Sunday newspaper and gave it enormous press, and I think quite rightly the Prime Minister was annoyed that I had not given him the opportunity but never mind.

I’d have reported the tutor who asked me to read an essay to him sitting on the toilet as he lay soaping himself in the bath.

I would have spent more time with my parents. I did see them often, but you don’t realise how much you’ll miss someone or something until it’s gone.

I could have done without being sexually assaulted, or having an eating disorder, or pushing myself to breaking point, but every chapter of my life brought me here.

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.

I’m not really ashamed, but I haven’t read Lord of the Rings.

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, 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.

I remember being a teenager and writing this romantic short story in the style of the Brontës on a computer and I didn’t realise that the person whose computer it was could just print it out. A group of boys had a couple of pages and they were all reading it.