This is me

My first home is in Stanford in the Vale, a large village in the Vale of the White Horse, Oxfordshire, England, together with my wife, Lisa Miriam. Our daughter Rachael (23) lives a few miles away in Faringdon, and our other daughter Katherine (21) is away at university, LSE. Our son Ben and his wife Alison and our grandaughter Amelie live in Norwich. My other home is Aix en Provence, in the south of France.

A physicist by profession, I have spent most of my career on research into the technology of fusion energy, particularly the safety and environmental aspects. I work for the ITER Organization at Cadarache, France, where I am head of the Environment, Safety and Health group. Although I'm based in Provence, I get home to Oxfordshire quite frequently.

Amongst my spare-time interests is amateur radio. I've been involved in this for many years, and for 13 years taught the City & Guilds Radio Amateurs Examination course run by the Harwell Amateur Radio Society. My amateur callsigns are G4HLX and F5VLD, my son Ben is G8EQX, and my younger daughter Katherine is 2E1HFX.

A good deal of my time is spent on church activities, too.

Computing has been a part of life since 1971. Since then, when I worked with a huge ICL mainframe with power far inferior to my pocket PDA today, I have used a lot of different machines ranging from toy computers like the ZX Spectrum to giant Cray supercomputers. These days most of my computing is on PCs running Linux or Windows.

The photos on this page are rather old!