Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

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My cast away this week is the Agony aunts and writer Denise Robertson.

If they awarded degrees in empathy, she would have gained a double first.

A warm heart and a kind ear have served her well during four decades of dishing out advice.

But her most obvious attribute for the job is having herself lived a life beset by struggle and tragedy.

She's been widowed twice, dealt with financial hardship and lost a child to cancer.

She says, the greatest enigma of all, as far as I'm concerned, is why the pendulum must always swing from zero to a hundred

and never stop at the midway point where most of us would prefer it to be.

And I wondered, as I read that, Denise, if you were talking about the lives of the people who write to you and call into you or if you were talking about your own life.

My life has swung from one extreme to the other when really most of us want the pendulum to be in the middle.

And I think people see it depending on their own view of it.

Remember walking across the market square in Sunderland once and a woman who I didn't know put her hand on my arm and said, you've had a tragic life.

And walked on and I stood there thinking what does she mean because I've had a brilliant life.

There have been times when I thought just as I get things right, fate steps in and kicks the steps away from under me.

But then you pick yourself up again and one thing I have learned that the anticipation of bad things is much, much worse than when the bad thing happens.

There's almost a sense of relief when you think, well, it's come. Now I deal with it.

What about anticipating something rather jolly and June, you celebrate a big birthday?

I'm not looking forward to that at all because I hate birthdays with those in them.

Do you?

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