Around 2018, when I was at Oracle, I was booked to speak at an event in Prague. The organisers told me to expect about fifty people. Two turned up.

The first feeling is a kind of humiliation. You have told your mum you are speaking at a conference abroad, and now you are looking at two faces in a room built for fifty. But those two people chose to be there, and they deserve a good session. So I ditched the slides and made it a conversation. It turned out to be a good one, and for that night, at least, I made two friends.

If a big room is only half full, ask everyone to come down to the front. People laugh and clap together when they sit together, and spread across a large room they don’t. The request makes a nice opener, too.

It happens the other way as well. I have turned up expecting a small room, found a crowd, and wished I had warned PR and legal.

Rooms rarely turn out quite the way you were promised. The trick is to roll with it.