My second thing to be proud of is this – it’s the Café Royal, surely one of the most prestigious locations in the whole of the UK, if not the world. Why is the location an important one? Well, it’s where I gave a paper at a conference this morning to around eighty people about blockbuster drugs and patent protection.

This is a remarkable thing for the ‘kid from nowhere’ who started work twenty-seven years ago, with no qualifications to speak of and aged a tender seventeen. Not only that but I’d had a terrible education in as much as every few months I was uprooted from a school and plonked in a new one and in all, I went to fourteen schools in ten years.

So, I started from the bottom rung of the career ladder in market research for two reasons only, firstly because I could walk to my company’s office from my home and therefore not incur any costs to travel there and secondly because the other jobs I was offered were in banking and market research sounded much more interesting than banking…..and I was proven right there!

Now, I’m a board director of a huge multi-national company and although I have some terrible and terrifying situations to deal with (such as my traumas of the last few months), I also have an amazing career path that someone with a good ‘red brick’ university degree and a masters would be proud of.

Me? I’m just the kid from nowhere with a good brain and a can-do attitude. They’re my qualifications and they’re what have given me my opportunities. That’s reason to be proud all right!

Last year, I was walking down memory lane and two years ago, I was taking one of our supermarkets to task for their appalling treatment of a man in a wheelchair!