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.

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

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

Is the raggle-taggle Brangelina tribe any more bogus than that of the landlocked yummy mummy who believes that she can drop half a dozen brats and still keep a modest carbon footprint? I don't think so.

When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by what I thought of as its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common.

As a kid, I grew to define what I didn't want my life to be like by sitting behind moaning women on the bus, hearing them bang on about their aches and pains, both real and imagined.

I believe, literally, in the God of the Old Testament, whom I understand as the Lord of the Jews and the Protestants. I'm a Christian Zionist, as well as a Christian feminist and a Christian socialist.