Seven random facts about me. 1. As a baby I was left in my pram outside the greengrocer's shop because my sister, who had pushed me there, was so eager to get home with the first bananas on sale since the 1939 war broke out. As she sat with our parents engorging the fruit, mum asked "Where's the baby?" 2. As a four year old I nearly killed my grandmother. She was warming her knees at the open fire when I threw a firework into the grate. It exploded. Grandma's death months later was not, I am assured, connected in any way to this incident. 3. As a favour to my first wife, after we split up I took our dead budgerigar to a taxidermist. I collected the stuffed article two weeks later. I was accompanied on both occasions by the person who was later to become my second wife. 4. In the course of a single week, I found my mother dead from a drug overdose at home, attended her burial, and got married. 5. My father worked as the caretaker of a further education college whilst in denial about his near blindness. He managed to perform all the tasks assigned to him, and more, but caused some consternation when he mistook Margaret Thatcher, on an official visit, for one of his cleaning ladies. 6. One of the things I learned from psychotherapy is the importance for me of doing less than my best and being happy with it. 7. I have shared a urinal with a former British Prime Minister - not Margaret Thatcher.