Introit I’m driving along the Oxford Road towards Witney, in the early morning of April 2022, listening to Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances on the Classic FM. It’s music I grew up with, and it’s a perfect memory for the scene. …

I’m not a celebrity, I’ve never robbed a bank, never received a Nobel prize — and I never signed up to the vanity queue for climbing Everest. Nonetheless, I have a few stories I can tell. I reflect on those episodes from time to time, but I can’t easily recall…

Tadpole days before it all got serious… — Bloxham is a small village, about a mile in diameter, about three miles from Banbury, and about thirty miles from Oxford. …

How science came to be on the agenda — 11 years old and secondary school meant a change of venue. The Warriner School was just a couple of hundred yards from our house, at the opposite end of the village to the Primary School. Whereas the Primary School was composed mainly of temporary prefabricated buildings (Terrapins), the Secondary school…

Freedom is going deeper — When I was fourteen, the school encouraged all the students to go on a field trip to Gower Peninsula in South Wales. There were occasionally school trips like this, such as the exchange visit to France. Normally, my family couldn’t (or perhaps wouldn’t) afford these field trips, but after a…

16–18 in a flash — I’ve been called highly productive, but it’s more a case of emergency drainage to keep an overactive brain from blowing a gasket than wilful genius. There are just too many things buzzing around in my head to keep them there, let alone try to perfect every one of them. I…

The Runaway University — Sometimes we find a voice in the words of others. Sometimes we’re able to express ourselves uniquely without someone else to lean on. We all have different voices depending on the context we find ourselves in. Some are soft, some are harsh. …

How I got into computing — While I was at University, as an undergraduate, I wrote a book about C Programming and promptly became in demand as a teacher — not in academia, but in industry. My tutor at Newcastle, who was in the maths department, discovered it and surprised me by buying it. I was…

Student sans frontiers — Apart from being a song by the Scorpions, blackout is something I’ve experienced in different ways, virtually and physically. Ever since I was a teen, I suffered from whatever happens when you stand up too quickly. There’s some pinched blood supply in my neck that cuts off the blood to…

Wind and wuthering — The year before I finished my PhD, a group of Italians came to study architecture at Newcastle, as exchange students. I was already living with two architects in the flat, and we knew several more, so they came to our flat to make some friends. They were a stunning group…

A Phase Transition In The Works — After years of acrimony, my parents divorced and my Mum moved to a new house in Banbury. This made it more awkward for me to visit, as there would always be the question of where I would stay, for how many days, and whom to visit first. I'd always been…

An unexpected turn — When my Royal Society Fellowship ran out, and I was no longer a (jolly good) fellow, I got two more years of funding from the Norwegian Research Council, with a little help from the department, but after that the money dried up. In 1994, the money fell out of science…

Travelling and becoming a computer scientist — News agencies love to make us fear other places and peoples, because they focus on the actions and words of their governments. Show me a country that really loves its government and I might not want to visit it. Before seeing with my own eyes, I believed that Norway was…

How the web became a detachable buoyancy device — Shortly after my move from physics to computer science, the World Wide Web became mainstream. The clock struck mid 1990s, and the starting pistol was fired on the Information Age. Before this, the World Wide Web had been a pretty fledgling curiosity for sharing content from CERN, with browsers like…

From monographs to novels — When I was younger, and I still had time to read for pleasure, I was wowed and amazed by the novels of science fiction John Brunner — Stand On Zanzibar (about over-population), The Sheep Look Up (about pollution). How do you write a novel about over-population, about pollution? …

Getting more personal — Boom, boom, boom. Smoke and sweaty bodies. Nightclub, Chelsea, Manhattan, New York. It feels like the inside of an old Victorian brick warehouse. The roof is curved like the arch of a steampunk railway bridge. On the other end of my nose is a churning sea of people, dancing face…

Research travails — Research is something that goes beyond work. It’s a statement of identity. When people ask me “Do you have kids?”, in my mind I want to say: “Yes, they’re just not human”. My kids are my books, scientific papers, software, pieces of music, work. Things that came from me, that…

Give and take in the world of agents — There’s an unspoken bond between researchers. You don’t criticize the tenets of the field in which you work; you don’t try to do anything to undermine the fragile status quo. It’s sometimes a hard promise to keep. It’s the opposite of what scientists should do, if they keep their promise…

Darker times afoot — A premonition from an unlikely spirit guide confronted me on a trip to Vancouver in 2006. Intending to catch up with the Networking EMANICS community, I set forth to the NOMS 2006 Networking conference in Vancouver, Canada, but on arrival a terrible flu befell me and I squandered the event…

All abroad! — With the sense of a future in academia collapsing in 2007, I needed to escape the toxic alley I’d wandered into. I was hitting bottom from work, from a personal breakup, and from battling my own shortcomings. …