It never left me. It is in the small things – like the decision to order the lobster – and the big things – like leaving my job as a columnist at the Guardian after twenty-six years to become an academic. That was entirely informed by that lesson. I thought, I don’t want to die doing this, I want to die somewhere else. People still ask why I left, and my answer to them would be: well, if I don’t want to do it, it doesn’t make sense to waste any remaining years of my life on it, does it? That attitude has worked out well for me, an unlikely class-shifting dude who went from the working class into the middle class. I would often say to myself, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen?’ I said it so many times until I no longer needed to. Because the worst thing that could happen to me already had – my mum had died – and so that left me with a calculated sense of fearlessness. It gave me a yardstick I would use to make decisions. A lot of the time when you are making a decision you know what the answer is, you just need the courage to follow through on what you already know to be right. My mum gave me that courage, in both her life and her death.