Surprisingly I have enjoyed just the best 18 months of my life she wrote concluding: For the

“Surprisingly, I have enjoyed just the best 18 months of my life,” she wrote, concluding: “For the record, I would not have changed one thing in my life; I’ve had a wonderful time. Here’s wishing you happiness and fulfilment in all that you choose to do. All my love, Michelle.”Many people, on receiving news of such an illness, throw everything in the air and rush around the world to see the Great Wall of China, and do all the other things they’ve never done Michelle did none of that. She kept going to work because that was what she loved above all else. “Michelle was determined to carry on living life on her terms right until the very end,” said Sam Rayner. It was from Lakeland’s managing director, Sam Rayner, and it began: “I am sorry to tell you that our very dear friend and colleague, Michelle Kershaw, passed away after a year-long battle with cancer…”Attached to it was Michelle’s final note.

In her 28 years with the firm, she appears personally to have sampled or tested every one of the 5,000 products her catalogue carries – which means, as one waggish customer put it, that her home must have been subjected to so many different cleaning chemicals that Hans Blix wouldn’t go near the place without another UN resolution.The customers love her. When Terry Wogan let slip on Radio 2 that she was ill, she was deluged in “get well” cards.This week, a new catalogue arrived But with it a very different letter fell from the envelope. When Lakeland celebrated its 40th anniversary, her office wall was covered floor to ceiling in cards. When she got married, she received hundreds of wedding greetings. I went in, and discovered an Aladdin’s cave of gadgets and gizmos. There was only one thing missing – the breathless enthusiasm of the catalogue prose of the firm’s customer director, Michelle Kershaw, who slips into every mailing a chatty letter full of recommendations. Over the years we’ve heard about her holidays, her wedding, her “cleaning philosophy”, and how her PA Barbara always makes sure there are fresh flowers on her desk.Her tone is that of a family friend who knows all too well about the state of the cupboard under your sink.

In the sense that it works for the convenience of its students, rather than the other way round, it is a bottom-up venture, and it is perhaps that, more than anything else, that makes it unique.”Most universities copy Oxbridge,” says Sir Graham Hills, former principal of Strathclyde University and the author of the report that led to the setting up of the Institute. “Oxbridge is not a good model in my view because it’s too academic and too narrow. The breadth of the first degree is not adequate for people going out into the world, and the specialisation is not enough for the professions The Americans have had it right for a long time. In fact, the Americans borrowed from the Scots and now that model is being repatriated.”The UHI is not yet officially a university, but it expects to become so, given the big political push it is getting from Scottish leaders. At the moment, its degrees are validated by the Open University, but one day it hopes to do that job itself.The omens look good.