I have always voted Labour and I always will. I have got to have one stupid, bovine part of me and that's the part that votes Labour.

Being a monarchist - saying that one small group is born more worthy of respect than another - is just as warped and strange as being a racist.

I know that Brighton is famously a mixture of the seedy and the elegant, but in the summer of 2001 seediness swamped elegance hands down.

Families, generally, suck. And I say that as someone who, like my husband, had parents who proved the proverbial exception to the rule.

My favourite spectator sport is watching people who should know better searching for something, and often claiming to find it, where it never could be. Women claiming to find feminism in Islam is a good one.

In my third husband I had discovered a blissfully laid-back type who thought it nothing less than hilarious when I misread the map on the way to Wales, so it took us an extra three hours, or when I was sick in a plastic carrier bag during much of the drive back from Devon - a bag that turned out to have a hole in it.

The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.