Dame Felicity Lott

Robert is different.

Raoul.

And all these, I just fell in love with all these sexy sounds.

And so it was what I wanted to do for my career was be an interpreter.

But unfortunately, my brain doesn't go from one language to another very fast.

I can manage one at a time, but people would say, how do you say so-and-so in French?

And I would know it, but I wouldn't be able to get it out quick.

They'd have gone mad in Geneva if I'd been doing the translations for them.

No, I studied French.

I went to university, to Royal Holloway College.

I had no idea.

I went to France for a year as part of the degree course, and I was an assistante d'anglais, so English assistant in a school in Voiron.

I lived in the school and Voiron was about 15 kilometres or a bit more from Grenoble.

And I was supposed to give English conversation classes to these reluctant teenagers who weren't much younger than me.

And I had to stand in front of this class and think of things to talk about.

And apparently I tried to teach them the rules of cricket, which my father thought was hysterical.

No.

Hopeless.

Absolutely hopeless.

Well, I'd come from an all-girls school and then an all-girls university where they took men for the first time the year I went, and they were a funny lot, most of them.