Reading the news. It’s a dull job.

I worked in the stores of Edgware hospital when I was about 17, and it was grey and depressing.

It’s a toss-up between organising a new filing system at Hammersmith & Fulham social services and relying on tips in the least popular restaurant in London to get through drama school.

Helping to slaughter farmyard animals as a kid; watching while my aunties cut them up to get their guts out and seeing eggs floating around in the hens. That made me become a vegetarian.

In my 30s, I was staring at a pair of expensive boots in a shop window when the photographer Gordon Parks came up behind me. He instantly understood, because he grew up even poorer than me; he made me buy them on my credit card.

Feeling you want someone else’s welfare as much and sometimes more than your own.

Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.

Sometimes when I’m on a plane, as I often am, the weather is rough and we’re worried about going down. I think: If I hold the hand of the person next to me, I’ll be holding everyone’s hand. Like my dear friend, the late Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, I want to know: I’m going to the other side of the mountain.

I haven’t done it yet.

Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.