The subject of my thesis was Virginia Woolf, an author whose works I loathed and yet had never bothered to read. I had to decide if it was appropriate to fall in love with the portrait of an Edwardian lady wearing an emerald green velvet dress and wasn’t clear if this was the plot of one of her novels, if I had dreamt it or if it was real life. And who was this character ‘Carrington’ who kept cropping up?

I kept wondering about the spelling of ‘exercised’/’exorcised’ and whether it was right to use it in the context of ‘you seem really exercised about that’. PB was wearing an amazing three piece suit on stage, reading the Financial Times. This was quite a performance and should gain him a whole new army of female fans.