I’ve been lugging around Doris Lessing’s books, which I have yet to read.

Absolutely none. I’ve had three run-ups at Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and I conclude it must be boring because I’ve never finished it.

Anything by Dostoevsky. I tried!

I never finished The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

I wouldn’t change anything. When I was 29, my first husband died, so I learned a new way of thinking about life, which is: there are many things that you can’t control.

Listening to a song that my brother-in-law – the brother of Jason, my first husband – wrote, about how hard it was to live without his brother.

I worked in a cafe, which I loved, but when it was quiet we had to scrape the fat out from between the tiles on the floor with a butter knife.

When my first husband died, because it felt like my life was over, and it was challenging to keep in life at the time.

My mum, for the way that she brought up her three children and managed to make her money work. She worked as a cleaner for all these families we went to church with. She would cycle there with my little sister on the back of her bike – we didn’t have a car. She had an amazing mind for planning and organising so that we got to do ballet, we went to Brownies.

All the big ones – climate change, safety for our children, money.