When I give talks to young people about journalism the same issue tends to come up, time and again. “How many celebrities have you met?” is one version of the question I’m most often asked. While I don’t like to disappoint my audience, and in all honesty there may have been one or two interesting celebrity interviewees across 30 years of journalism, I feel obliged to tell them that the most interesting, the most engaging, the most exciting, and certainly the most inspiring people I have met have relentlessly been people you might call “ordinary” – but who turn out, over a coffee, to be anything but.

Broadly speaking, there are three “types” of interviewee for journalists. One is the expert: the individual, sometimes highly placed in an organisation, whose professional position or knowledge means they have wisdom to impart. Then there are “famous people”, or celebrities; and, finally, people we sometimes call “case histories”, although I prefer not to use that description. It seems demeaning to the people I learn the most from, and to whom I feel I owe the most gratitude.

Who are these people? Well, something has brought them to the attention of whichever newspaper or magazine I happen to be working for. Often, it’s something traumatic or tragic; they’ve been bereaved in terrible circumstances, or they’ve suffered in an accident or from a disease, or they’ve been the victims of injustice.