I hated counsellor training

In practically every respect, I’m a useless human being. This is not the vanity of false modesty – I really am worse than most people at most things. I’ve never picked up a musical instrument, a golf club or a foreign language; I can barely boil an egg and would find it almost impossible to paint a wall without stepping back and kicking two and a half litres of emulsion all over the carpet.

Yet I thought, in terms of life experience, that I’d make quite a good counsellor. I was one of five children with a father too sick to work. We lived on benefits, had free school meals and our clothes arrived in bin bags from the local church. It was a fairly bottom-rung start but I’ve since made a very decent living as a writer, including a stint doing some light counselling as an agony uncle for a women’s magazine.