If you've been fat, you will always feel and see the world as a fat person; you know how difficult it is... It's the same coming from a working-class background... it never leaves you.

We must recall the most important of humanity guidelines: Be polite. Being polite is possibly the greatest daily contribution everyone can make to life on Earth.

I can only work between the hours of 8:30 and 4:30, because that's when the kids are at school. So I get to do all my work and have all of my fun in that time, which means just sitting on a chair, typing, alternately clicking between writing a column and being on Twitter, and smoking as many cigarettes as I can before my lungs give out.

All the things that are taboo are the things that are not normal, and all the things that are not normal are the things that are exclusively about physically being a woman.

When you've got a mother who's given birth to eight children, you know, often without any kind of medical intervention - just she gave birth to one of my brothers sort of on the bedroom floor in front of all of us -you know, you see that women are fairly capable.

Feminism means something - legislation, cultural change - but 'Girl Power' meant nothing more than being friends with your friends.

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves - rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.