Who would you like to see playing you in the movie about your life? Who do you think the casting people would choose? Miss Hoolie from Balamory. ALF, the friendly alien puppet.

What’s the punchline to your favourite joke? ‘I’m not Willie Nelson.’

If you were to return in a future life as an animal, what would it be? A human, but this time around, one that looks exactly like Elizabeth Debicki.

If you were playing in an escape room, name two other people (well-known or otherwise) you’d recruit to help you get out? Oh any of the Doctor Whos: they’ve already got the screwdriver. I’ll take any two of Ncuti, Peter C or David: keep it local.

When was the last time you were mistaken for someone else and what were the circumstances? It is a minor thrill for me if anyone asks me for directions in a foreign country. Last month I did a library event in Utrecht and was walking away from it, and a woman asked me for ‘something something bibliotheek?’ and I smiled and pointed it out to her and felt very smug.

What’s the best cover version ever? It’s probably Johnny Cash doing ‘Hurt’, but I have a very soft spot for The Chicks’ take on ‘Landslide’.

Whose speaking voice soothes your ears? Alex Jennings. I will listen to any audio book he has anything to do with. He’s just such a beautiful speaker and actors aren’t trained to sound like that anymore, so there’s a hint of melancholy even in hearing it.

Tell us something you wish you had discovered sooner in life? That you have a choice in how you feel about quite a lot of the things that happen to you.

Describe your perfect Saturday evening? Ooooh winter, dark, fire on, kids all home, stiff G&T, sleepy dogs, enormous bowl of crisps and either an incredibly good book or some incredibly terrible TV, cosy bed with electric blanket on at 9. I absolutely love a party and going out, but that’s what Tuesdays are for.

If you were a ghost, who would you haunt? Oh that sounds boring. Do you mean like watching the queen go to the toilet? No, I think I’d rather be an angel and dance in clouds and sing in chords and play my harp. I already play the harp, but very much not well enough to get into heaven.

If you could relive any day of your life, which one would it be? Any single day when the kids were little and couldn’t stop talking. I love them big but I miss them wee. Of course, at the time it felt exhausting. We found an old video tape (it’s actual tape) recently where my husband had just left it running in the car and it was 30 minutes of the three of them asking questions and squabbling and being noisy and hilarious, and it was like finding rarest gold.

What’s your earliest recollection of winning something? I won something at a Glen Michael’s Cavalcade live show and got to go up on stage. Deeply terrifying. I always found him scary anyway. Stupid Paladin.

Did you have a nickname at school that you were ok with? And can you tell us a nickname you hated? Yes I had a nickname, no I was not ok with it and one of the many joys in my life is never, ever having to have one single further interaction with any of the people who used it.

If you were to start a tribute act to a band or singer, who would it be in tribute to and what would it be called? I couldn’t, but my dad used to play in an Eagles tribute band called Hotel Caledonia.

When were you most recently astonished by something? I am watching the explosive growth of solar power and battery storage times in absolute amazement. The world is now adding a gigawatt (that’s about a million homes) every single day. It’s going to happen. We’re going to do it. In a world of rotten news, this is the kind of thing I’m desperately clinging on to.

What tune do you find it impossible not to get up and dance to, whether in public or private? Kate Bush, but only with likeminded chums. ‘Cloudbusting’ is very much a group endeavour.

Which famous person would be your ideal holiday companion? Michelle Obama complains vociferously in her excellent memoir that Barack would just take himself off to Hawaii and read for three weeks solid, and I would be very down with that.

As an adult, what has a child said to you that made a powerful impact? It was when the pandemic finished and the kids were finally back at school after 18 months of just kicking about with us: no activities, no holidays, nobody going away to work or anything. My husband asked, ‘Ok, well we should try and think of one positive thing about the pandemic: what was the best thing about it?’ And my then 12-year-old said, ‘oh, I would say, all of it?’ and the ten-year-old agreed vociferously. We overschedule kids a lot.

Tell us one thing about yourself that would surprise people? I’m a galloping train nerd and can often identify the trains that pass our house by sound alone. I held my 50th birthday party on the Caledonian Sleeper. One of my presents was a model version of the sleeper, which we built to go round the buffet car while the train was moving. I am desperate to be published in China so that I have an excuse to take the Shanghai Maglev.

When did you last cry? Oh god, it’s so awful. You know you associate songs with big moments in your life? So we just dropped off our second son at uni and the song that came on the radio was ‘The One And Only’ by Chesney Hawkes and the verse, ‘No one / Can be myself like I can / For this job I’m the best man’… I was gone, and I am quite annoyed it was a song so dumb and ubiquitous that I now have to cry along to it for the rest of my life.

What’s the most hi-tech item in your home? I have a PageFlip Butterfly. When I’m playing piano, I read the music off the iPad and that’s my Bluetooth foot pedal that magically ‘turns’ the pages. Apparently, it will also work if you wink at it but I haven’t managed that.

What’s a skill you’d love to learn but never got round to? I’d love to be able to animate (computer, stop-motion, hand-drawn, anything). I just don’t have the patience. I’m not built that way. But I like to draw little cartoons and it would be cool to see them move.

By decree of your local council, you’ve been ordered to destroy one room in your house and all of its contents. Which room do you choose? The last owner remodelled our flat before we moved in and it now has three bathrooms which is, I feel, rather de trop for the three people who still live here. They also put a TV in the shower. I cannot, or do not want to figure that out at all.

If you were selected as the next 007, where would you pick as your first luxury destination for espionage? Ooh, I know exactly where, because it’s on my list: the Grandhotel Pupp in Czechia, which is where they filmed the casino scene in the Casino Royale remake. If I’m ever stressed, I go and look at the pictures on their website. One day…

Jenny Colgan (with Anne Marie Ryan) appears at Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Sunday 16 November, as part of Aye Write; The Secret Christmas Library is out now published by Hodder & Stoughton; main picture: Lisa Ferguson / The Scotsman.