In 2016, I fell off stage in Switzerland and broke my back in four places.

I had a cardiac arrest in 2010. I also had a close call in the early days in Cardiff when I was in a band called the Denims. We were in a van driving along a narrow mountain road. Somebody wanted to go to the toilet, so we stopped, and afterwards the driver took a wrong turn and we went careering down the mountain. Everyone was screaming, it was like a nightmare. At the bottom was the railway line, but the van stopped just in time. We were very lucky.

I was invited to Sharon Tate’s house the night she was murdered. I declined the invite due to jetlag.

A flight from Paraguay to South Africa that went badly wrong. The plane nearly fell out of the sky and the oxygen masks dropped. People were screaming but the pilot saved the day, and then apparently never flew again.

Also my most triumphant: 2017 at the Royal Court. Julie Hesmondhalgh reads my psychologist’s report over two hours. Every excruciating intimate word of it. Extreme verbatim theatre. One night only.

Believing in, even admiring, people who refuse to believe in me, and not believing people who do.

That I can’t write.

Life is not worth living if there is no one you would die for.

I spent my life searching for family. I travelled around the world to look each one of them in the eye. Unfortunately, but understandably, for most of them, I am their biggest disappointment.

When I was a child, a member of staff at Wood End Assessment Centre [a former children’s home in Wigan] bellowed: “He copies them poems off of Bob Marley records.”