We aspire to the magnanimous firmness of the philosophic sage.

[…] he went off alone with his family, and, watched by the day's red baleful eye, pumped the pump-car homeward, […]

I mismixed some treatment for fungicide on tomatoes, he remembers, and I killed every one of them, probably more than 50 plants. We had to buy tomatoes to can that year.

It taints your CV as people look at it and see what's gone on and it does put a bit of a black mark against you, says the man who, in 2006, was head hunted by Preston only for his tenure to be brought to a halt 17 months later.