When I was five and the doctors walked in and said to my mum: “I am not sure if you will be taking him home.”

One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the moment of passing. In this life I have already been declared dead. It wasn’t so bad. After the first ruptured artery, the doctors thought I was finished. My wife, Chaz, said she sensed that I was still alive and was communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said our hearts were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered. She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I am, alive.

Rolling a quad bike.

A picnic on the beach at Seaforth during the war. Somehow I managed to wriggle through a barbed-wire fence and run across a minefield. My teenage aunt Kat bravely followed suit and rescued me.

Rolf Harris – he let us all down.

In my first bedsit when I went to art college in Leeds. It was a hideous basement, but I loved the freedom.

A vet, but then I discovered you needed qualifications.

Yesterday: I went to see the film God’s Own Country.

A black Mercedes 500 coupé in the mid-1980s. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d seen. (I had been clubbing the night before.) And I can’t drive.

To my first real boyfriend, for being so mean to him. But really I was just being mean to myself.