Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.

If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.

I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.

I'm the co-chair of the PTA at my kids' school, Ashmount Primary, in north Islington, London.

Does everyone turn into a truculent thirteen-year-old when they go home, or is it just me?

Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.

I cry at everything, even the length of the queue at Sainsbury's.