Friday Five

1. Are you married?
Not at the moment, although I am in a long-term relationship. With two failed marriages behind me (and the last split particularly acrimonious) I'm kind of phobic.

2. When do your claws come out?
More than anything else the thing that is guaranteed to get me boiling mad and spitting is being accused of something I haven't done. Several nasty examples of this before the age of 10 has made me hyper-sensitive. Often, it doesn't even have to be anything especially important.

3. Have you ever been in a car accident?
Several fender-benders but one really significant and scary event where I hit a patch of black ice, span round twice and rolled over into a ditch. I hung upside down in the seatbelt for a few seconds before releasing the clasp and landing on my head. Dust and grit from the carpets rained down all around me. When I reoriented and pushed the button for the driver's window it opened onto the side of the ditch. Grass. No crawl space whatsoever. I opened the passenger side window and on that side, luckily, the ditch side was angled less steeply. There was a 9-inch gap just big enough for me to pull myself out, which I did - energised by visions of the inverted car exploding in a fireball at any second. When I stepped onto the road I nearly fell over - it was a solid sheet of ice. As my eyes accustomed to the gloom (it was around 6.30am) I noticed another car 30 feet from me which had suffered the same fate. I looked the other way and was just in time to jump out of the way of a third car pirouetting across the road to hit the ditch between me and the first.

When the police brought me back to the car later that day to pick up the rest of my stuff, I could see in the daylight that if I'd left the road 50 yards earlier or later there would have been no ditch to break my fall. A steep embankment fell away 100 feet to the moor below.

4. Who is the last person you held?
Nikki.

5. Describe a time you've gone overboard:
I went literally overboard when three mates and I took a boat on the Norfolk Broads in 1976. We anchored in the middle of a lake and went swimming.