Who am I?
| By a quirk of fate, or perhaps bad timing on my parents' behalf, I avoided being a groovy sixties kid by a few months, and instead grew up in the seventies in beautiful Bracknell, widely regarded as perhaps the finest new-town between Ascot and Wokingham. Of course it would be cool to report that I'd had some terribly deprived childhood, as my parents struggled to make ends meet in a desperate battle against ravaging poverty, but in fact that would also be completely untrue. |
Everyone it seems has their own homepage, so why miss out on the fun? When I wrote the first version of this page, it was really simply as an excuse to learn some basic HTML programming, and I was more worried about the nuts and bolts of the language than what I actually said. Then I became sidetracked into a little historical research about cycle-racing - which resulted in my Professional Cycle Racing Palmarès site - and it is only now that I am coming back to look at all my other pages. So this seems as good a time as any to try and write something a lttle more informative.
By a quirk of fate, or perhaps bad timing on my parents' behalf, I avoided being a groovy sixties kid by a few months, and instead grew up in the seventies in beautiful Bracknell, widely regarded as perhaps the finest new-town between Ascot and Wokingham. Of course it would be cool to report that I'd had some terribly deprived childhood, as my parents struggled to make ends meet in a desperate battle against ravaging poverty, but in fact that would also be completely untrue. Neither can I claim an upbringing in a terribly bohemian artistic milieu: instead it was simply just another suburban, middleclass, neither conspiciously wealthy nor conspiciously poor childhood. Light relief was obtained by playing lead balalaika in a Russian Folk Music group. My father was a meterologist which explains the Bracknell upbringing; once we (myself and assorted siblings) were all of school age, my mum worked at various welfare assistant jobs in schools.
All of which suburban boredom continued until I found myself studying a for a chemistry degree at the University of Oxford. Whilst there, when not simply lapping up the beautiful surroundings of New College, where I had a scholarship,I spent most of my daytime cycling and a fair number of evenings in the Phoenix or PPP cinemas searching out what I would call off-beat European art-house films, and what my sometime-tutorial partner called dodgy movies with subtitles. "Art is just a euphemism for bonking", as he put it. Perhaps a little to everyones' surprise I duly got my first; the news of which was slightly underwhelmed by the fact that I was suffering from food poisoning in Morsbach Jugendherberge, near Cologne, at the time. Still, nine weeks of cycling and walking later I returned to Oxford for some research with Professor Malcolm Green, FRS in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, working in the general area of organometallic synthesis of compounds with metal-nitrogen multiple bonds. You can judge my productivity by viewing my list of publications. In the meantime, I also spent a bit of time teaching at Exeter College, where I was Junior Fellow in Inorganic Chemistry, as well as at various times being Captain of Oxford University Cycling Club, secretary of OU Russian Club, and a triple cycling Half-Blue.
A few years later, armed with a doctorate and a round-trip flight to Los Angeles, I came to the University of Southern California where I have been since, working for Professor Mark Thompson on electro-optic materials. In my spare time, since LA really wasn't designed with cyclists in mind (in fact, I'm not sure whom they had in mind when LA was designed.....), I've spent some time writing for the Daily Trojan, which is the University Newspaper. Add to that spending a fair amount of time relearning the social and literary history of my country with the aid of George Orwell, amongst others, and generally decrying the complete absence of comedy in the US - at least deliberate comedy; there are plenty of examples of accidental facets of American life hilarious to an outsider - and that more or less concluded my life as a chemist. Thereafter, I returned for a briefish job at the University Offices back in Oxford, before taking a job as an Information Designer at Digitext. And if you want to know what one of them is, well, take a look at the company's home page!
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