The print size in my mind decreased with time’s incremental decline, and as I arrived at the last word – weeks – it suddenly struck me, with all the force of the fullest sense of the word ‘struck’, that this could actually be his answer and not just the logical next time period in my sentence. Every cell in my body, except those responsible for maintaining a reasonable, calm exterior, was now lindy-hopping at that possibility, the only one that hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

A plane to San Francisco, 25 years ago. There was a bang and I looked out of the window and saw flames coming out of one of the engines. We zoomed down to the airport below.

I’ve had a surprising number of near-death experiences: I was nearly blown up by a landmine in Sudan; I was stranded on the Zambezi river at night; I was bucked off a rodeo horse in Arizona and had to be airlifted to hospital; and, worst of all, I once ate a Pot Noodle.

Again, too many times to mention, but probably being swung from the balcony at the top of the Columbia hotel in London by the bodyguard of a Saudi Arabian princess was fairly close.

That time I congratulated a waitress on being pregnant.

“Didn’t you used to be Graydon Carter?”

Canadians are trained to say sorry to almost everything and everyone.

Intermittent laziness.

My children’s education.

My first week in New York in 1978, when I was about to start as a writer at Time. And my first week in the south of France after retiring from my job of 25 years as editor of Vanity Fair.