You drive past your old high school, and even if everybody treated you terribly, you still go take a look, don't you?

I like having the space of my own project.

All my kids play guitar, sing, and dabble with writing.

We always make a hot breakfast for the kids: oatmeal, pancakes, bacon, scrambled eggs, the whole deal. We like to have that time in the morning together as a family.

When my twin grandchildren, Linda and Lyeke, were born two years ago, it changed me. I felt it was the essence of what life is about, and I cried all day. When my son Pierre, their father, was born I didn't cry like that.

I've gotten a firsthand view at the destruction that black men and black women not being able to stay and build healthy relationships has had on the black family and black children.

When I was 13, I won a scholarship to boarding school. My parents let me choose whether to go, and I decided I wanted to. Afterwards, I went to Cambridge to study law - in a way, I was carrying the academic hopes of my family, as Mum and Dad left school at 14.

Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody... as a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.