1. As a student in the 1970s, I went to live in West Germany and was almost immediately thrown out of my lodgings when the tenants discovered they shouldn’t be sub-letting. Alone, homeless—and at one stage almost arrested on a bus for producing the wrong type of ticket—I wandered the streets until I found a bedsit so damp there were mushrooms growing on the walls. Fellow bedsitters included several Hamburg dockers who poured me shameful quantities of schnaps every evening. I spent the weekends reading Kafka. A teacher at the school where I taught English said this wasn’t a suitable way for a twenty-year-old to live, but I felt happily bohemian all year.
Joanna Campbell, Instructions for the Working Day
2. I am so short-sighted I can’t see anything that isn’t an inch from my face. By 1972, when I was twelve, they couldn’t increase the strength of my glasses prescription, so to give me the best vision possible, I was allowed free contact lenses on the National Health. To ensure I qualified, I had to undergo a vision test without my glasses, but when they asked me to read as many letters on the board as I could, even if it was only the huge one at the top, I had to confess I couldn’t actually see the board.
3. When my husband was teaching me to drive, he opened the passenger door slightly to check I was parking close enough to the kerb. I don’t know why my foot pressed so hard on the accelerator, but he fell out of the car and it was a while before I noticed. And I once dropped and broke a ceramic dish of sage-and-onion stuffing, but rescued the stuffing, unable to spot any shards. After one mouthful, his tongue was cut to ribbons.
4. When my husband set up his own company, he asked if I would be his secretary, but had to sack me for poor performance.
5. I had wanted to play the piano since I was a child, but the chance didn’t arrive until my late forties. I couldn’t even read music at first, but eventually took exams and, after failing one because my hands were shaking too much, finally reached Grade Five. I performed a duet at the Cheltenham Festival with my youngest daughter, but went wrong in the first bar and lost my nerve completely. She had to carry the whole piece on her own, with me adding the occasional (wrong) note.
6. Reversing along our lane three days before we were due to sell our car, I crashed into a neighbour’s house, demolishing his Cotswold stone wall.
7. When my eldest daughter was about eight, I stayed up half the night sewing her costume for the school play. The next morning, she struggled into it and said it only had one armhole. Even with her one arm trapped inside, I strenuously denied this was true. And when my husband phoned from a business trip 3000 miles away to ask how we all were, I managed to make it all his fault.