Having cakes as a business certainly changes things for me - I don't now sit at home doing a cake for the fun of it anymore. But it's an extremely happy and pleasureable business to run because people are generally buying cakes for celebrations.
As a child, I wanted to marry a farmer, but no doubt the reality would have been very different to the idyll in my head.
I think one wants lots of different lives.
Acting has been very useful to me.
I was always very determined, as was my husband, that we wouldn't let any of our children act when they were young.
I look at myself objectively and in a way I see myself as a commodity. Your name becomes somehow outside yourself. Now, when I'm at home being Mrs. Scarfe, that's when I'm most myself.
The rehearsal time is almost my favourite part of being an actress, particularly if you're working on a play that hasn't been done before.
The things you leave school knowing - some dates and long division - so much of it has been of no use to me. Schools should teach the basics of cookery, first aid, how to look after your money and how to speak foreign languages. Useful things.
People ask what the secret of a happy marriage is. If there is one, it's 'don't talk about it.'
We get a lot of overseas people wanting to order cakes.
I do enjoy fashion - a lot of runway clothes are pretty unwearable, but if moderated, the trends can be worn by just about anyone.
I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.
I enjoy the crafts on the show enormously, too, when we have experts in showing how to make things. You watch them thinking you'll go home and do the things yourself, which is fun. Some I have done myself later on.
There's also something of an illusion in that, you can perhaps record a TV thing one month and complete a book the next and then be in a play. Then, if they all come out at once, it looks as if you're actually juggling a million things.
Of all the things I do, acting is the thing that grabs most, but there's another level on which it strikes me as being a little silly. In the end you're dressing up and deciding to be somebody.
An actor's job is about putting across the author's intention; I don't think of myself on the same level as a creator.
Thank God I've never had the sort of intense fame that means you can't walk up the road. That sort of blazing stardom must be difficult to cope with and maintain; my career has just bubbled along happily.
I do find modern jazz quite tricky.
I swim more or less every day.
Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world.
