Eleanor is now 34, and has yet to start a career. Born and bred in Cambridge (lugging book bags and instrument cases around King's Choir School and the Perse School for Girls) by some fluke she ended up reading Classics at UCL. On the way, she picked up three instruments (French Horn, Viola and Piano), dropped one (Piano), played in heaps of orchestras and spent two happy years scrattling viola at Junior Guildhall on Saturdays.

Unfortunately, aged 19, she became interested in student politics, rabble-rousing from her hot seat at UCL student union security desk. She also preferred doing silly things like parachute jumps for Rag, than doing any Latin vocab revision. As a result, having scraped a BA Hons 3rd in Classics in 1992, she found it easier to win an election than have a job interview. Thanks to her student constituency power bases at Royal Holloway, Royal Vets, Queen Mary, Wye, Heythrop, SOAS, LSHTM, Birkbeck and SES, she became Vice President Communication and Welfare at University of London Union for 1992-3, specialising in resolving complicated PhD disputes. At the same time, she held down a position on the executive of National Union of Students London Area, and volunteered for Newham Monitoring Project.

After a successful term of office she went back to Cambridge for a kip. Several years of Cambridge musical indulgence ensued, working as a secretary with Donald Insall & Assocs Architects, then moving to Schlumberger Cambridge Research, to fund her orchestral habit. This modus operandi continued a bit too long, and one day she woke up she wanting a pension, health plan and share options.

This required a move back to London. Ploughing through the temp secretarial world, by 1998 she had become PA to the MD Finance, KC Wong, at Benchmark Group PLC.

The death of her father, Prof Pat Merton, in June 2000 brought everything to a grinding halt. And now we find Eleanor back campaigning, rabble-rousing, psycho-babbling and, yet again, playing lots of lovely music. Creating Adhoc Humanitarians, and putting on this concert, is the first of a long string of commitments she is planning for humanitarian fund raising purposes.

Contact Eleanor at ellie@adhochumanitarians.org