I’d have told a racist cabbie to go fuck himself, but I was scared about being chucked out on the street at 2am.

I would do more weightlifting than aerobics. Strong is better than skinny.

When I thought maybe I've just got a few weeks, I thought God this is what they mean by the reckoning. I've got to sort all this stuff out in days. Is it possible to sort out all those things in your past that you'd prefer not to have done? ... But actually by going through the process we've gone through, I think we have. And it's a real blessing to have this time do that.

I should have known that I might not like what my brain scan showed, just as I should have known that the symptoms of prostatism that were increasingly bothering me were just as likely to be caused by cancer as by the benign prostatic enlargement that happens in most men as they age. But I continued to think that illness happened to patients and not to doctors, even though I was now retired. Twenty months after I had my brain scanned, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. I had had typical symptoms for years, steadily getting worse, but it took me a long time before I could bring myself to ask for help. I thought I was being stoical when in reality I was being a coward. I simply couldn’t believe the diagnosis at first, so deeply ingrained was my denial.

Kind, funny, alive.

A magazine editor.

If mobile phones hadn’t been invented.

“You’re a reasonably intelligent girl,” by a teacher, and it drove me crazy and made me want to get into Oxford.

Not enough food in the fridge.

Things, situations, people evolve constantly. Nothing is static.