'I feel like a chemical Peter Pan'

I like speaking foreign languages, particularly Russian. I’m half-Russian, my father was born in Moscow. My French and German are rather rusty, and I once tried Chinese but I didn’t get very far. I can read Cyrillic, but I not sure that I’ve ever read a whole book from end to end in Russian.

I went to an English boarding school – that’s enough to put anybody off sport! I enjoyed the countryside aspect of boarding school. I hated the food. I once threw up over the dining table when forced to eat meat paste at tea.

As a schoolboy I built a Van de Graaff generator out of a copper ballcock from a lavatory cistern, a plastic drainpipe and the reflector from a car headlight. It wasn’t brilliant but I think it produced about 100,000 volts, which was still moderately spectacular. I was lucky to grow up in a time when people did built apparatus a lot more. One of my students was offered a job by a visiting industrialist on the strength that she had spanners poking out of her lab coat where others have pens.