The reason I don't like rules now is that I grew up with a lot of extraordinarily weird ones. I was forbidden to speak to people who lived in council flats. "Why can't I talk to them – they've got toilets inside, we haven't?" I'd say to my mother. Got whacked with the hairbrush for that.
I've been married four times and lived with a lot of blokes – I know how men's minds work. What have all the men I've been with got in common? They're all pathetically grateful.
We had a Welsh-speaking budgie. My mother missed Wales very much. I don't feel Welsh at all. There's no Welsh words for anything modern.
I hate Facebook – a complete waste of time. I want real friends, not cyberfriends. There's a Janet Street-Porter appreciation society on Facebook? They can fuck off, for a start.
Men get vague with middle age. They lose the ability to multi-task – you send them out shopping and they come back with the same things: English mustard, gherkins, bacon.
It's not a glass ceiling, it's a concrete one.
I've never been on dates. Sometimes one husband has introduced me to the next. Always shag men when you first meet them, because if the sex is shit you don't need to see them again.
I was 12 before I accepted my parents were my parents. My parents read the Mirror. I thought they must have picked up the wrong baby. I expected my real parents to collect me – I imagined they lived in Epsom and read the Guardian.
I'm a dumper, not a dumpee. Men have this pile of chips in a relationship, and as it progresses they do things that annoy you and the chips go down – they don't change toilet rolls or light bulbs, get the wrong shopping, forget your birthday. Their chips rarely go up.
I'm keeping some chickens, pigs and calves at the moment. I'm not bonding with them; I don't feel any emotional connection. I want them to have a decent life and a dignified end – a bit like human beings, really.
My relationships have taken the place of having children. And so has my career.
Fleet Street was different in my day. I was at the Mail in the early 1970s. On Fridays we'd start drinking about 1pm at El Vinos, then the French House, lunch in Wheelers, to the Colony Room, then down to Jerry's, and then fall home completely trolleyed about nine. So I'd write my column in the morning.
I've never signed on. Never claimed for anything; never been unemployed for one nanosecond.
Twitter's for twats. You can overcommunicate; we're communicating piffle. You don't need to tell everyone you've just had a crap or hear that Sarah Brown isn't eating veal. Sarah Brown, by the way, hasn't been elected to anything. She is a PR woman.
I really can't stand Jeremy Clarkson. I can't stand that programme, the way his jeans fit around his arse – it's all tragic. I'm never going to get a sexual thrill out of holding a gearstick. I only drive auto. I think it's something men invented to make women feel inadequate.
Elton John named one of his Alsatians Janet. Because it yapped and barked a lot.
The class system in this country is the most rigid in the world. When I got the job editing the Independent on Sunday, the Telegraph attacked me, saying I wasn't qualified to edit a newspaper. When I was at the BBC I had 250 people in my department and a budget of £35m – from what people were saying you'd think I'd been plucked from a council estate in Epping, it was so classist.
I just like doing things that I haven't done before.
Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down by Janet Street-Porter is published by Quadrille, £12.99