What I really appreciate about working with homeless people is that when you get to that basic level of survival, all the human pretence is stripped … - Ingrid Andersen

I married very young – to a brilliant and immensely destructive man whom I met at university. Twelve years of that marriage nearly destroyed me. I chose to end the marriage and to survive.

Some people find the goldfish bowl difficult to live in – I thrive in it. There is no peak hour traffic. The cathedral bells ring on Sunday and Thursday evenings in the mist. The sunsets are spectacular. You can find a donkey cart (with a set of donkeys) parked neatly in a bay between a BMW and a Golf, and there are often cattle in my street. Cattle have right of way.

Someone has to do something about the pain and the poverty, and I’ve been given a good set of resources to do it. So I get stuck in and I get very motivated by watching the change take place in people’s lives.