Well, fairly good at most things. I wasn't particularly good at writing essays, I think. The literary side was probably one of my weaknesses. My father always said that I obviously showed mathematical talent at an early stage because when we travelled around the world, the Middle East, we would exchange currencies and my pocket money would always seem to make a profit out of it. And he was convinced that I was going to be a mathematician, and there had been some members of the family, earlier generation, who had mathematical talent. So they were convinced I was going to be mathematical, but I was fairly generally good at most… most things at school to a certain stage.

And then towards the end of my school when I got on to A levels, at that stage I was very, very keen on chemistry – I had a good chemistry teacher – and I think at that stage… and I did some… chemistry has nice experiments you do, and I had a friend of mine and he had a lab at home and we used to do a lot there. But after one year of advanced chemistry I decided that I just couldn't… I didn't have a good enough memory. You know, you have to learn these voluminous books, Inorganic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry; and so mathematics was much simpler, you didn't need to memorise things. So that was more or less the determining stage. From then onwards it was quite clear I was going to pursue mathematics. But until then, there were other alternatives, yes.