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I'm not in the business of warning people.

I was not scared at all.

Now the difficulty with those warnings is that they were not specific.

I wasn't worried about unemployment.

I was frightened. I hadn't really had any experience, and then all of a sudden I was thrown straight into doing interviews. Most people have build-up. I had none.

I have always advised people never to apply for a job you do not really want.

Throughout my whole swimming career, I've never been disqualified once. I've never been warned once.

I didn't look very sensitive and they didn't know me very well.

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.