I once threw up on the shoes of one of my vocal heroes, the Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan. He sent me home in a taxi with a towel.

At the Mighty Hoopla festival, Kimberley and Nicola from Girls Aloud joined me on stage for a Girls Aloud song. I completely forgot the words.

Helen Mirren was in the elevator with me at the National Theatre. She pressed the button but it didn’t move. I said, “Fancy seeing you here and being stuck in an elevator.” And she said, “Was that meant to be funny?” I apologised, and she laughed. Even talking about it now, it feels so awkward and embarrassing.

Do you have 10 pages? Once, I was dancing in a costume that was like a corset. During a move, the corset ripped and exploded, and I had to carry on doing the number practically in my jockstrap.

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.

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 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.

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

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