The first real test was an investor day at a hotel in midtown on the fourth of December, six weeks after the door.

Four hundred people.

Eleven analysts in the front three rows whose entire professional function is to notice things.

A stage with four steps up to it and a lectern, and a hundred and ten minutes of programming with Vivienne Bramhall on for twenty-two of them.

I had been to that hotel four times in the preceding nine days.

I want to describe what that preparation actually was, because it is the closest thing to a competence I have ever had and because it is almost entirely unglamorous.

I walked the route from the service entrance to the green room and counted it: one hundred and fourteen paces, which was impossible.