My personal opinion is that you can't be racist towards white people. You can be prejudiced about them, but being prejudiced isn't an illegal act, whereas being racist can be.

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.

And I also felt that no one in an audience could abuse me worse than the sort of abuse I had had at work as a psychiatric nurse.

There's still this underlying image of women that they should fulfil a certain role. It's no accident that a lot of men who are a bit misogynistic tend to say things like 'get back to the kitchen' or 'why aren't you at home looking after the kids'.

It wasn't a conscious effort to have kids later. It was just the way life goes.

I made a supreme effort not to do that thing that parents do, which is to bore people without children to death by going on and on about how funny their children are, so there's none of that hopefully.

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.