If you could edit your past, what would you change?

I would never have smoked - I gave up years ago.

The respelling of my name to Joseph.

Nothing. It’s too risky. What if you eliminated a misjudged situation from your life and it turned out that one of your children wasn’t born, or you failed to meet your partner?

So many times I’ve wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I’d just been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I’d be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road are our lives made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.

My sister’s death – I would love to meet her kids. [Karen Grammer was 18 when she was abducted, raped and murdered.]

I would do a lot more investments.

I would have articulated aloud the comments I too often suppressed out of deference to arrogant, condescending, sexist bores.

I would never have gone on a diet. I would go back with the knowledge that not being perfect is fine.

I wouldn’t bother learning how to use logarithms, and I might give netball a miss.

I practise stoicism. Not the stiff-upper-lip, modern stuff, but the ancient Greek philosophy. You have to accept what you can’t change. I try to face forwards all the time. When that doesn’t work, I think about buying a machine gun.

I would have honoured my body, I would have lived inside it, cherished it and protected it.

I would have been a better listener. I would have pursued more friendships instead of focusing so much on work and myself. I’m doing all that now, but I’m running out of time.

I wouldn’t care so much what people thought.

I made too much money in my 30s, and it distorted my writing and made me less hungry. Then, in my 40s, I spent all the money on daily life – and now I don’t have it.

I’d give myself some fashion sense.

I don’t think I’d change anything: the bad forms you more than the good.

When I was working hard, I was going so fast that I didn’t absorb a lot.

I would have skipped the time my daughter was nine to 13, when I was in a toxic relationship.

I would have gone to my singing lessons at Guildhall.

I would try to be a little nicer to my teachers.