Secret CSO: David Scholefield, Demica

What is your favourite quote? “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself” – Albert Einstein. He’s obviously not suggesting we can teach many six-year-olds the detailed mathematics of relativity, but, if we understand a topic enough ourselves, we can explain how it works in a manner clear enough that a six-year-old can digest the idea. It’s absolutely true and is a good test of our own understanding by any measure.

What are you reading now? Georges Simenon The Snow was Dirty. His Maigret novels are excellent, but his non Maigret novels are genius.

In my spare time, I like to… Mountain bike over the beautiful Cotswold hills where I live with my equally biking-mad husband, or go motorbiking around Europe, traveling from small hotel to small hotel and drinking wine and eating cheese! Will this information be used for retrieving forgotten passwords in some way? Personal data is valuable you know! ;)

Most people don't know that I… have an unusual form of dyslexia whereby I tend to write the most stressed syllable of a word first and then fill in any other part of the word before or after that syllable afterwards. In handwritten work, my brain seems to have compensated by leaving gaps around the syllable so I can go back and fill the gaps in (often the start of the word): something very strange to watch but doesn’t seem to slow me down. Obviously with typing on a computer this is not such an issue as the text moves to make space if I need it anyway.

Ask me to do anything but… Eat carrots – why, oh why, do so many recipes or meals seem to contain carrots? I have in the past, and do still, eat an amazing array of foods that many other people seem to feel queasy about, and I love fresh vegetables of all kinds, but carrots revolt me.