Writer

I've always hated the idea of carrying grudges and resentments around like a load of mouldy suitcases.

Many poker players swear by sleeping a certain number of hours before a tournament, going to the gym in the morning, and 'clearing the mind.' Juggling two jobs alongside my chosen game, I never have time and am invariably sending work emails from my iPhone between hands.

I grew up near London Zoo, with which I was obsessed. I would lie in bed at night, thinking about the lions and tigers and wolves that were prowling only a few miles away.

The older you get, the more 'mindfulness' becomes about trying to remember why you came upstairs.

I won a prize for 'best sponge cake' at the Clacton Festival 2005. Having said that, I was only up against three other cakes.

You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.

It's not that I can't find art beautiful. I just don't know what to do, standing there in the gallery. I don't know what to think about. Once I've seen it, I've seen it; that takes about two seconds. I am interested and then immediately bored, immediately.

I don't really think of myself as stupid - but then, who does?

The phrase 'working mum' makes me nervous.

I know schools don't have money for everything, but I wish they could all have a couple of violins for kids to try; a couple of cellos, perhaps a bassoon.

I never wanted poker to be a job. That's partly because I love it, and it's fun, and I didn't want it to stop being fun, and partly because, I suppose, something in me doesn't feel right about calling poker a job. It's not grown-up enough. But it's a hobby that takes up an enormous amount of my time.

You can always recognise my restless peers and me; we are the people whose feet you hear tramping along the pavement at the other end of the phone line because we can only make calls while moving.

I'm just a poker player who does a bit of TV.

Ed Miliband should be out and proud about his abstruse interests, his Master's in Economics, his political obsession, his prioritising of the mental over the physical.

I'm convinced we go to school at the wrong time. I'd have been delighted, aged 12, to get out into the world and earn some money doing something menial.

I play poker, a game where there is no edge but the luck of the deal and the skill of the player.

After a bath, we all love to dry off with a towel. But do we need it to survive? No. It's a luxury.

People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.

The Highway Code can't be that difficult to understand, and yet my brain seems to treat it as a set of nuclear fission instructions in Old Japanese.

When I was at school, I got into trouble quite often.