About me

	This picture was taken at a pass half-way round the Fairfield Horseshoe in the English Lakes, in April 2007. Dry, sunny weather, excellent for hill walking. Lots of hard slog, most of it up and some down, plenty of variety in the scenery, plateaus where one can catch one’s breath and admire the view, and the prospect of higher heights with even more interest. Somewhat epigrammatic of life perhaps.
My penchant for mixing art with technology initially manifested in my teens by tinkering around on a piano together with messing around in a ‘home laboratory’ in the garden shed (I remember making around 200g mercuric fulminate). Later this migrated in my twenties into more visual arts with lots of painting in oils and pastel. However my University education was a degree in maths, and I spent my early twenties as a mathematician for British Aircraft Corporation.
This allowed me to develop my taste for lecturing, as I organised courses in using the mainframe computer for engineers, using Fortran and IBM 360 Assembler. Getting bored with the restrictions of living in Stevenage (although there were many compensations – clean air, copious woodland, quiet pubs), I soon started commuting from London, and then took a job as a lecturer for Cybernet Research Consultants. After a year I joined Honeywell Bull in Hammersmith as a lecturer, which sent me to Paris, Frankfurt and Turnu Magureli (in Romania) to lecture on the company’s operating systems.
A colleague pointed out an advert for lecturer required by Sunderland Polytechnic (later to transform into Sunderland University). I had what I thought was a disastrous interview in the winter of 1972, complete with heavy head cold, but I got the job of senior lecturer in maths & computing and kept it for the next six years. This gave me the time & income to experiment with wax and casting processes;  long holidays which I frequently spent walking in the Lake District and the Highlands; to get my music diploma as a keyboard teacher; and to cycle the length of the country on one memorable summer, from Lands End to John O’Groats. Oh, and get stuck into another half-dozen or so computer languages, rather inevitable for anyone working in computing.
However, I felt six years was long enough working for the same institution and moved to London. Along with sporadic periods of unemployment, I had lacunae of very well-paid work as sculptor and systems programmer. This latter was for a City financial company in the Interest Rate Swaps section. After a management buy-out, I found myself dumped on the steps of the new offices, given the taxi fare and three computers, and told to ‘work from home’. That was the beginning of six hours of trauma followed by six years of the most blissful (and well paid) employment period in my life.  The final product was an interest rate swaps and derivatives program written entirely in assembler, to service a large broker dealing room.  Although a professional user of high-level  computer languages, I maintained, and still maintain, that assembler language is better. It all came to an end when the company fell foul of new City trading laws and was forced to close.
All this time I had been teaching sculpture and ceramics in the art room at Central YMCA. A very lucky break courtesy of The Worshipful Company of Founders gave me a week’s free training in bronze casting at Central St Martins with David Reid, who I think is now probably back in his native New Zealand. Regrettably, the college (which has now been granted university status) closed down the foundry sometime in 2005.
Well, there is always me to teach bronze casting in central London! I have run such courses from Central YMCA since 1998, although nowadays most demand is for silver (jewellery design and related subjects). For five years I was also employed by City of Westminster College as an hourly-paid lecturer, teaching object-orientated programming (C++ and Java). In addition I would teach sculpture from life at PSAD, on Fridays. The net result was working 60 hour weeks, and at the age of 61 I felt it was time to cut back. So regretfully I said goodbye to City of Westminster College, who as with many other colleges at the time, were being pressured to take on the 14-16 year age group and were cutting back on their professional-level programming courses.
On getting a present of a Yamaha P85 digital piano for Xmas 2008, I was found I was able to resurrect my keyboard skills (my last public concert was way back in May 1981). Though my eye and brain are not so sharp, my performance in some ways is better, due to the responsiveness of the modern digital keyboard. And my interest is re-awakened by the selection of ten voices, which can be combined in pairs with upper or lower octave shift.  However I do not think my standard will rise to a sufficient level to give any more concerts!