EH’s confession was that she had not really been “working at home” on Monday, but at a job interview in Norfolk. She had been offered, and accepted, a chair at the University of East Anglia.

“Whatever’s wrong with working here?” I enquired.

“This corridor”, she replied.

She had a point. Our offices were hardly the most luxurious, accessible from a peeling blue-painted corridor reminiscent of an abandoned hospital, just like that in the 2010 film of MacBeth starring Patrick Stewart.