Throat and neck cancer in 2018. They told me six to eight months if it hadn’t been caught.

I’ve dodged a couple of bullets in dodgy war zones, but I suspect the closest I’ve come to death was a reckless, drunken brush with a waltzer at a student funfair. It nearly chopped me in half.

When I rode on the back of a motorbike from London to Rome with my eyes closed the entire way.

So, when many years later I really was near death as a result of a haemorrhage after a miscarriage, and heard a doctor saying “She’s very near collapse – call the lab and tell him to run” and understood that the “him” was the person fetching the blood they were going to pump into me, I was not in the least alarmed as I dimly wondered if I had the strength left to think some suitable Last Thought, concluded that I hadn’t, and said to myself the words: “Oh well, if I die I die.” I was sure, then, that nothingness was just that.

Anybody who invests the lion’s share of their time in helping others.

As someone who tried to keep learning, and wanted to help.

Having children: it’s what I’m most looking forward to.

Jump Around by House Of Pain, and Pull Up To The Bumper by Grace Jones: stuff people could dance to.

How little confidence I had in my late teens and early 20s.

I bought all my siblings signet rings and pendants with my family crest on. There are a lot of us.