Author:

Experience
2001- *****-**** Ltd
As a Director of this high-technology startup company, I get to work from home and make the coffee, decorate and babysit. I also have to talk to a small number of customers and astronomical numbers of doltish sceptics who aren’t. We do anything which requires a creative approach to making things work -and which can help fund my caffeine addiction.

2001-2001 Stringvestment East Ltd
Despite having my lips stapled together, I lasted a month at this tax-funded quango. They were supposed to be attracting inward investment, but actually the Women’s Institute do a more effective job. Low pay, political correctness and panto-politics by people who wouldn’t know an investment opportunity if it leapt up and bit their ass. I left my suit behind and I’m told it’s now in charge of an entire department.

2000-2001 Fishshit Merchandising Plc
Before realising that it was all funded by inherited, untaxed cash, I worked like hell to ensure that these guys didn’t lose all the clients to their cocaine habit. Eating fried egg sandwiches whilst hungover in meetings was considered an essential part of the board’s rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. I won’t dwell on the prostitutes and the drug money laundering. Then they sacked me and the industrial tribunal scared them into a payout. Truly an example of the best in modern management.

1994-2000 Demonfart University
This crowd had just been handed a big cheque by the government to keep the local ineducate youf under control. I was hired after about 9 interviews by a status-obsessed, drunken vice chancellor. Thankfully, this period allowed me to do my own thing almost entirely and that included a great deal of house restoration and babysitting. Eventually they twigged and suggested that I could teach some courses, if I liked.

1990-94 SHAMBLES Ltd
I tried to run a professional software marketing operation, despite the best effort of the lunatic MD, a retired academic nazi who used to slap the Chinese development staff members. After being sacked (by fax) I set up a new division of the company and we competed with the UK parent, despite legal threats. The VP of sales, an ex US Marine, went completely Iwo Jima and pulled the plug.

1987-90 XYZ Technology Portfolio Consulting Group International Ltd
Great fun spending the budgets of international clients on making whizzy technology to daftly tight timescales. Forced to work for a boss who was the ultimate twitching conformist, I left after developing several interesting bilge pumps….and doubled my salary.

1986-1987 4 Lowlife St
Unemployed house decorator, daytime tv critic and babysitter

1986-1987 Museum of Abstract Theoryfying, University of Cambridge
Worked as a post-doc for a vampiric mathematician who regarded all of science and everyone below professor as his personal property. I walked out when my patronisation detector melted.

1985-86 Dodgy Engineering Ltd
Worked for a weasely Glaswegian with a seriously limited sense of humour and a schoolboyish approach to amateur lechery. After only a few months chainsawing in the snow I quickly realised that my vocation lay elsewhere.

Ejucation
1997- 99 St Barclay’s College, Cambridge University (MSc)
Working on a real PhD, my supervisor died and the department shut me out “that strange Irish fellow (was) having ideas incompatible with his status”. I got to see some real Science, though, despite the best efforts of the university administration to destroy its own brand by a combination of toadying and laziness..

1982-85 Hairyoldtwitt University (PhD)
Three years of fun in the festival city. I was paid to have all-day coffee breaks and played a mean game of indoor football. I supervised ‘workshop practice’ and almost no students were hospitalised during my lathework classes. Completed a thesis centring on steam engine technology which had been perfected in 1829.

1979-82 Imperial College, London, B.Sc. (Eng.)
As an engineering undergraduate, I just managed to avoid failing by adopting toxic caffeine dosage and perpetual stewing over problem sheets about redesigning 30-year old powerstations. It was a collection of soulless grey towerblocks each with a queue to commit suicide. Fun was outlawed; creativity would see you expelled. There were no women and the staff were almost uniformly unhelpful pencil-neck Cambridge rejects. I’ve tried to hand back my degree but they wouldn’t reimburse the fees. Don’t go there.

1972-79 Regiment House School, N. Ireland
Wasted much too much time playing rugby and mooning around after girls who later married some real mrpotatoheads. I managed to survive a martinet father, unlimited television and a terrorist war in the background.

Personal
My interests include:

reform of higher education
celebrating absurdity
curiosity-driven Science
parenthood
avoiding employment and starvation, simultaneously
toxic caffeine

I dislike several things about text. One of the most annoying aspects is its linearity. You have to wait until one of those point things before you can start to understand what the most recent bit was about….by which time, you are supposed to refocus on the next part. It’s a little like having to pass the ball backwards in rugby -whilst nominally running forwards. And yet, when confronted at school by a poem about a star, with the words arrayed in the shape of…wait for it…a star, I found it completely contrived -the kind of thing solely written for ‘o’ level students to emulate as an exercise.

That’s another thing. With text, the shape it takes up is very much across-the-page. If the line length is much more than a few saccades-worth, I find the effort required to scan the pagewidth is enormous: after a while it becomes prohibitive. I spend a lot of time looking at the shapes within text at different scales: letters, words, sentences, paragraphs -being badly distracted by the information that these configurations contain, rather than by the meaning – It’s just not obvious to me at what level of ‘chunk’ is the meaning intended to be conveyed -individual words are too small, sentences are often too long.

One influential factor in my attempts to interpret these symbols may be that I’m mildly synaesthetic. When I look at text, I have the strong feeling that some of it is coloured (I know it’s not really, but in my mind’s eye, colours are somehow ‘attached’ to the letters). The word ’synaethesia’ for example has a red ‘a’ and a green ‘e’ next to each other. The rest of the word is dark grey. This, by the way, plays havoc with my ongoing attempts to understand mathematical symbolism. Mathematics tends to take on an immediate interpretation in terms of shape and colour which makes it harder to think about what the symbols stand for.

This also means that I have had, from early childhood, atypical mental maps of things. I believed, until in my twenties, that everyone had these internal constructions. Time, for example appears in my mind’s eye as being a large helix (the year, which is non-circluar in section) superimposed on which is a tighter helix representing the weeks. On each week’s swirl, Monday starts at the bottom left and sweeps up through the weekdays to Friday at top right, before swooping leftwards and down to form the loop which begins again at next Monday. I used to use this as a small child to visualise events in the distant future and drew great benefit from not having to rely on a conventional rectilinear calendar model.

There’s a horrible asymmetry about text that I’d prefer to see replaced by some kind of two-dimensional mind map. I always end up having to break the 2-D, pictorial way I think into some linear, toothpaste-squeeze sentences. This makes it all too easy to use too many words to get my point across, assuming I have one. When the meaning is expressed using a large number of sequential words, I find it becomes diluted, rather than intensified.

Writing has the great strength that so many combinations of thoughts can be expressed by a small collection of symbols. This sheer combinability of text, which doesn’t rely on being constructed from one-dimensional strings, is what enables people to create something unique to them and, god help us, publish it .

‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ – Soren Kierkegaard. (1813 – 1855). Cheers Soren mate -is that supposed to help?

0:00 Midnight and I’m still not asleep. The LED’s blink back at me across the bedroom as I iterate my mental checklist of things-that-urgently-need-to-be-stewed-upon.

0:07 I begin an alphabetic list of favourite films, beginning with ‘Bond’ but only get as far as the ‘Big Sleep’.

0:22 Think I’ll have get up and write some of this down as a to-do list -or simply shoot myself.

0:42 That’s not the answer to everything.

1:01 Wakefulness isn’t the worst possible way to spend the night.

1:23 Last resort, counting sheep.

2:47 I’m now officially insomniac, all the time.

3:03 A tool with a worker at either end.

3:14 PI time. Maybe transcendental meditation would limit this relentless search for patterns.

4:04 Unconsciousness? Still not found.

5:01 I might as well get up and get dressed.

British bulldogs. Not very politically correct. Simply rename it “Wolfhounds Achieve Parity”. A line of children stands across the street, arms linked and kids of the enemy ethnicity run at them with weapons. BBC News film the event (and maybe even sponsor a few retakes when nobody’s looking).

Hopscotch. Draw squares on the ground with numbers in. Doesn’t matter about the rules, the game doesn’t last long anyway. Invite children from the other community to play by hopping from square to square. Forget to mention the landmine.

Skipping. It’s for wee girls and ‘unmarriageable’ types. Instead, use the rope to hang someone you suspect of having moderate tendencies.

Marbles. Use a hunting catapult with reinforced carbon-fibre combat arm brace. When you run out of marbles, lorry wheelnuts work just as well. Don’t forget to burn the lorry.

Pirie and whip. A nice traditional one this. You can easily say, I lost the pirie.

Football. Are you wise? Who do you think you are, Geordie Best?

Pin the tail on the informer. A bit tame but for added excitement use a grenade pin. Dispose of the grenade responsibly -over somebody’s hedge.

Trainspotting. Write down the numbers of any unfamiliar cars on your street. Take them to your local hard man. Don’t try negotiating a price. Don’t tell that joke about Black&Decker.

Apple scrumping. Serious crimes like this will be dealt with very severely by the local Neighbourhood Representation Committee…but where would you find a bloody tree anyway?

Baseball. Throw the ball and mitt away. The pitcher chucks a half brick at you and then you hit him with the bat until he agrees to stay away from your weapons cache / drug dealership / sister.

The corner of his titanium-grey eye just caught the dull red ballistic airbursts a split femtosecond before the slugs from a brace of 7.62mm Schneitzler semiautomatic machine pistoles hammered into the historic iron gates of Buckingham Palace. Instantly he perceived the threat to their majesties and flung his whipcord-taught torso at the assailants’ armoured Mercedes. His parachute regiment training took over as his uranium-pointed heeltips penetrated the windscreen and snapped the driver’s jaw in several places.

“Pity.” he thought, as he remembered the Jermyn Street shoemaker whose finest handwaxed nubuck he had just shredded against the stubbly jowl of another johnny foreigner. The Mercedes slewed and bucked, the Scneitzlers barking wildly as the whole panjandrum veered towards the crowd of innocent wellwishers who had been queueing all night for a glimpse of their adored royal family. He reached in and wrenched the ignition loom from the speeding black behemoth, bringing it to rest inches from a small child holding a poignantly symbolic union flag.

The vehicle’s occupants, now in the gutter, were recognisable as Ali Turkman O’ Driscoll a fiendish foreign plotter, together with Hermann Schwartzpanzer a known assassin and devious henchperson. Both surrendered spinelessly when prodded by the gleaming chromium bayonet of a surprised grenadier guardsman. Although still dazed, they realised they had fallen foul of their ruthless nemesis, top-secret Agent ******* .

Later, smiling coldly, and still smelling faintly of cordite, he gunned the DB5 through the darkening streets en route to a stiff drink and a compliant Miss Rosemary Honeytrap. She held the key to The Department’s gun safe, but not to his cruel heart…

The three princes of Serendip were always making discoveries, by accident
and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.
Horace Walpole 1754

In an era of increasing negativity, the Campbell Laboratory latterly acted as a haven of scientific open-mindedness. Fergus relished any opportunity to challenge conventional beliefs and to consider seriously even the most seemingly heretical scientific proposals.

“Never talk yourself out of doing an experiment because the result is ‘obvious’ or because it may have been done before”, he warned, “we are all inherently stupid and can’t possibly anticipate Serendipity”.

Fergus Campbell was relentlessly curious, as demonstrated by his fondness for a new idea, an elegant experiment, a fresh face and the latest gadgetry. His was surely the only Laboratory where the visitors’ book listed Tibetan mystics, foreign inventors, MoD monitors, Soviet entrepreneurs, gadget salesmen, descendants of Lebensborn, painters and at least one self-confessed Messiah.

A scientific showman of Faradaic proportions, I remember Fergus convincing undergraduate hypnosis subjects that he had just walked across the ceiling in front of them. The scientific magic he inspired was most intense, however, when prisms, cardboard and string came together with an ancient projector or a war-surplus oscilloscope in pursuit of some question too ‘trivial’ or controversial for the attention of lesser scientists. As one of the last of this sorcerer’s twenty apprentices, I was saddened to see his conversation with Nature, his whole style of Science, effectively extinguished by the new culture of risk avoidance.

The conversation in both Phrontistery and Combination Room, I’m told, is safer and less demanding now:- although, on a Sunday morning, I still half expect to glimpse a minute, moss-roofed diesel buzzing excitedly towards the Craik-Marshall.

I distinctly remember seeing that streak of red and black shimmy down the left wing against the fluoresceine green of Old Trafford (no-one had colour tv in 1968, but the electron guns of my imagination were always set to maximum stun). Head down, flexing shoulders somewhere beneath his flapping shirt, white cuffs akimbo, he would slyly glance to a defender’s left..right…..left and then dart unexpectedly away from the ball he’d passed a second ago -whilst they spectated, half inclined to fear, half to applause.

By the time he reappeared, the ball was spinning against the distant net, on the end of his signature parabola.

For my generation he was certainly the best: a view he shared undiplomatically with Pele. He was our champion, our only true winner in a period when we were learning to be ashamed of ourselves. Nobody could identify with Mary Peters in quite the same way (and she was really English anyway, it was darkly rumored). Geordie could have been a catholic, he really was THAT good.

As for his lifestyle, how we aspired in my class to an E-type, sideburns and sex with Miss World (Actually, I’d have settled for the sideburns).

Pity about the drink, the Cookstown adverts, all those divorces, that wasted talent.

Why the self hatred, I wonder. We never met, so how come I miss him so much?

He’s a man I’ve never spoken to. I only ever see him riding his bike or running occasionally, but I’m completely convinced his character can be inferred from the way he moves and the calm look on his face.

He’s bald, not usually an heroic characteristic, but it’s his physique that immediately marks him out as special. His is what used to be called a military bearing (I can easily imagine him surrounded by the 1st SS panzer division, politely declining to surrender ).

A smooth, padding motion distinguishes his running style which is about 50% faster than I, 15 years his junior, can manage. My hero’s body remains the kind of wiry organic machine that athletes have -athletes, by contrast though, are such narcissists. I really admire his ability to sustain a high level of fitness and to remain in-shape long after his contemporaries (and their lardy kids) have deliquesced into couch-mash.

My father employed a string of young men over 30 years or so as his apprentices. Brian, Michael, Adam, Len and Eoin were not my brothers but each of them was discussed across our formica kitchen table as if they were his adopted, errant offspring.

We heard frequent tales about each of these boys -their lamentable lack of spelling ability, their growing shrewdness in business under the old man’s harsh tuition, their fondness for toasted sandwiches, their new band, their public tears when chastised, their faithless wives. They were subject to a combination of public humiliation and devoted practical help with which I was familiar. When I visited the workshop they kept their heads down. I suspect, like me, they stayed that way for much of the time.

My bolt-on brethren and I received equal treatment. There were three main differences. First, I naively believed that I deserved some measure of preference. Second, these young men seemed all to gain my father’s respect gradually and third, unlike me, they could walk away. In due course, all left but Eoin who, although he failed in his obvious quest to marry The Chief’s daughter, succeeded nonetheless in being gifted the entire business.

I had always had, since age seven or so, the suspicion that I was somehow a disappointment to the old man. My lack of any footballing skills, my chubbiness, my growing reluctance to kowtow, my use of dangerously effeminate words (like “ethereal”) -all of these marked me as different. When young Eoin received his inheritance, my interpretation was confirmed and my humiliation was complete.

It never occurred to me until recently, just before he died, that he was giving these young men the support that he had needed, and missed out on, when he was young. It’s maddening that I never qualified for anything approaching his love, despite my best efforts. My conclusion is that he had been given none and had none, in turn, to give.

I lived in a flat once which underlooked Edinburgh castle. Just far enough away to be able to hear the bagpipes during military tattoos without actually being inflamed enough to declare war on Scotland. That was to come later. My tenant and friend was a lanky young man with lots of strawberry blonde hair, some of which had located itself on his upper lip. He owned one pair of shoes and lived on nothing but 80 shilling beer, pork pies and what might euphemistically be called nightlife. He bravely lived with the danger of becoming one etiolated, sleep-deprived ‘plook’.

We had mutually decided that that smell in the living room (I had sold him the idea that it was his bedroom) must be coming from what had once been the carpet. In a futile gesture towards hygiene, we decided to pull it up and discard it. Eventually after a titanic battle, it was tugged away from its moorings (mostly it was held in place by mouse droppings, sweat, six-inch nails etc) only to realise that it was incredibly unwieldy. There was nowhere to leave something of this size; the street outside was already polluted by the cretaceous settee we had pitched there, four floors down, the previous week.

So there the carpet rested on the sooty plain of the front room’s floorboards. It looked like an attempt by a gang of disturbed four-year-olds to model in miniature the volcano above us that was Arthur’s seat. It’s probably still there, waiting for the day when Edinburgh City Council nail a blue plaque to the wall (right next to the Condemned notice).