Being an actor is inherently embarrassing. You have to embrace it.

Going to pieces while meeting John Squire, the lead guitarist of the Stone Roses, backstage after a gig. I completely lost the ability to speak. I told him I had the same guitars as he’d just used on stage, and when he asked me which ones, the words completely went out of my head and there was a huge pause, and then his wife tapped his shoulder and he wandered off.

Fainting as a chorister in Winchester Cathedral in the middle of a service.

The Fake Sheikh did a sting on me once and the News of the World headline was “Craig Charles is an evil drug-pushing monster”. That wasn’t good on the school run, I’ll tell you that.

To my younger self. I was incredibly self-loathing and self-doubting, and I’m still undoing that damage 30 years later.

My mother and my brother would still be alive. So much of my life has been coping with the grief of losing them.

People who can’t hear other points of view. Absolute certainty always scares me a little.

The summer of 1997. My husband, who is an American, gave up everything to come and live with me in Edinburgh when we were students, and we were so skint but we had so much fun.

My creative freedom. I was the creative director of a large fashion brand when I packed it all in to pursue my writing.

When I was about 18, I worked on the chicken counter in a large supermarket, and every morning I had to pierce 64 birds on to industrial skewers to load up the rotisserie. That was very grim.