I was born and brought up in Liverpool with my clever little sister Jemma who is 14 and wants to be a vet. My mum Jane is an administrator and my dad Peter is a taxi driver.

I've got a really great family round me two sisters and an older brother and my mum and dad. Everybody's equal.

Both my mum and dad were great readers and we would go every Saturday morning to the library and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature and all of us would come with an armful of books.

I stayed in Baghdad every summer until I was 14. My dad's sister is still there but many of my relatives have managed to get out. People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalized in any particular direction trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.

I was born in 1968 just eighteen months after my sister Chrisse and just one year after Dad passed the bar exam.

I was into all kinds of music as a teen - country music because my dad was in a band that played country and whatever my sister and brother were into.

My sisters have been baptized and my dad is a deacon at his church now. Sadly my mother passed away but what I can say is that the Jehovah Witnesses took very good care of her up until she died.

I had lost relationships with my dad my brother and sister and I was just like you know what this is definitely the time to just get it together and so that's what I did.

I used to have a silk dressing gown an uncle bought in Japan and when I came downstairs in it my dad used to call me Davinia. There was never embarrassment about that kind of thing. My sister used to dress me up a lot. She thought I was a little doll.

My parents were kind of over protective people. Me and my sister had to play in the backyard all the time. They bought us bikes for Christmas but wouldn't let us ride in the street we had to ride in the backyard. Another Christmas my dad got me a basketball hoop and put it in the middle of the lawn! You can't dribble on grass.