KEREN DAVID NICOLA MENDELSOHN

THERE’S A good story about Nicola Mendelsohn at the start of her career. Setting out for her final interview for a graduate trainee job at an advertising agency, she shut the front door of the house in Hendon where she’d been staying and waited for the taxi she’d ordered.

She waited and waited. No taxi arrived. What was she to do? These were the days before mobile phones and, as a Mancunian, she had no local knowledge. But she was determined to get to the interview. So she flagged down a passing car and told the driver, “You have to help me!”

Luckily she’d stopped a nice old lady and not an axe murderer. Mendelsohn got to her interview and got the job. That led to a very successful career in advertising, culminating in her current post as Facebook’s boss in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The story illustrates some attributes that have been helpful in her life since then. Determination is one and resourcefulness another. She’ll take risks, if necessary, to reach her goal. But most of all, it displays a basic optimism about life. And right now, living with an incurable disease, she needs it more than ever before.

We meet at one of Facebook’s offices in London. I’m surprised that visitors have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and so am not sure if I can report that the building is spacious and bright, there’s a help-yourself pick n mix wall of sweets and a coffee-dispensing corner, with lots of chocolate. The walls are hung with posters: ‘Nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s problem’, ‘Be the nerd’, ‘Remember, meetings were made for laughter’. You get the picture.

Before meeting Mendelsohn, I’d had a quick snoop at her Facebook profile (we have, it turns out, 19 friends in common). From the posts she makes public I see that she has a beautiful family , three sons and one daughter, lining up in her cover photo, all dressed in white, with her and her husband, the Labour peer Lord Mendelsohn.

Her life (or the bit she makes public on Facebook) is social and very busy with dinners and simchas and working trips abroad. But despite all this she has carved out the time to create a new charity, one which quite literally could save her life.

Unless you live in a cave, you’ll have seen the coverage of the charity’s launch (not least in last week’s