Spare your heart, save your soul. Don't drag your love across the coals. Find your feet and your fortune can be told. Release, relax, let go, And hey… - Elton John

At first I stayed in a hotel – the Inn On The Park, the location for the famous story about me ringing the Rocket office and demanding they do something about the wind outside that was keeping me awake. This is obviously the ideal moment to state once and for all that this story is a complete urban myth, that I was never crazy enough to ask my record company to do something about the weather; that I was simply disturbed by the wind and wanted to change rooms to somewhere quieter. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that, because the story is completely true.

If she wanted a row, Mum always knew which buttons to press, because she had installed the buttons in the first place.

Mine was just an ordinary general hospital: the Lutheran, in a suburb of Chicago called Park Ridge. It was a big, grey, monolithic building, with mirrored glass windows. It didn’t seem much like a place that offered yoga classes by the pool. The only thing it had a view of was a shopping centre car park.