I've never, ever had people being aggressive to me in public or abusing me, and actually quite a lot of men do say to me, 'You're quite good' - though they can't bear to go, 'You're great.'

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.

I've never been a fan of euphemism.

I used to get nervous about three weeks before a gig... now I've managed to condense it down to a manageable ten minutes.

I think it's so easy when you have children just to turn your focus inward on your family and because, when they're young, you don't sleep very much, you're walking around like a zombie most of the time anyway. It's a really important part of my life to have good friends, you have to work quite hard to keep the relationships going but it's worth it.

If you're a fat person - and especially if you're a woman - at all stages of your life you'll get abuse for it, so you have to work out a way of dealing with it. The best way is to be humorous about it - that defuses any tension.

To me, a politician's job is to listen to constituents' problems and try to sort them out.