My mum always felt that women deserved as much as men, and should have as much power, so I suppose I opted to go into a very male-dominated arena to try and prove that.

Again, with two small children it's incredibly hard to commit yourself to anything because you're just getting interested in it and someone comes along and goes I want Thomas The Tank Engine on, and screams the place down until you put it on.

Most of us manage the fateful things that happen in our lives the best we can, certainly not to a Stalin-like 20-year plan.

For a long time, people assumed I was gay, so when I got married the press were all a bit shocked and made a big deal of it - and ditto when I had children. I felt very much under the microscope with paps outside the house taking pictures of me getting the baby out of the car, it was excruciating. I remember getting her out of the car seat and thinking 'oh God I'm going to drop her and they're going to take a picture'. I was so nervous. Those sorts of things are really hard.

It's got too much hard work slapping them and telling them to shut up.

I've always liked to think I could do anything I wished as well as - if not better than - a man. But I wasn't very good at rally driving.

There are problems with nursing - such as the issue of nurses all having to do degrees these days. But that doesn’t mean to say the entire infrastructure of nursing is falling about and that it is populated by unfeeling psychopaths, which is, frankly, the implication sometimes.