It was all very well for so-called consultants and other well-wishers to advise me to share out the work, but everyone else was just so busy – and I couldn’t trust them to do the job properly anyway. Everything was in such a mess. A measure of this was that I had not managed to check the minutes from one meeting to the next.

However, we did have some good ideas. A newly appointed Canadian colleague suggested a more gung ho approach. Another said that we should not sneer at the involvement of Simon Cowell, but embrace his interest in our work on women in science.