About me

(last updated: 11/09/07)

I'm a 22 year old who has just completed a maths degree at Warwick University.  For the present I'm living at home about to start work.  If you want an up-to-the-minute account of my various adventures, check out my blog, Footnotes (so named for my shoeless tendencies).  

I hail from Brooksby, which boasts a once-Agricultural College and maybe a dozen houses.  Ours is an old station building you can read about under My Place.  My brother Robin, my dad and I built a shack in the garden out of reclaimed timber, and me and Robin live in it when we’re at home.  You can read about how we did it at My Shack. 

Apart from Robin, who is at Sussex Uni, I have an older sister, Anna, who has graduated from Cambridge with a History and Theology degree and currently teaches English at Beijing University in China, and a little brother, Thomas, who is 9 and recently started school after being home-educated for a few years. 

My school career culminated in A-levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Biology and General Studies (see CV).  I have put a piece of Physics coursework on the web, and it seems to be quite popular with people searching for Damped Oscillation graphs and suchlike.  One of my best memories of A-levels, surprisingly, comes from revising Biology.  I was told I wouldn’t get an A unless I decided to work harder, but I ended up trading off the difference between an A and a B with spending a beautiful few weeks up the river in my canoe (with a token biology text book in the bottom) swimming and dozing in between flicking through pictures of kidneys and hexose sugars.  More about our river, the Wreake, in My Place.   

One of my earliest boating experiences was helping my dad make a canoe for my birthday.  I must have been quite young, because it was only about 4 ½ ft long.  He still makes canoes, and is gradually getting more experienced, having sold a few on ebay, and running canoe building weekends for people.  I even made and sold one myself for the first time in 2006, to raise money for a mission trip to Montenegro in the summer.  And that's where I met Amy, my now girlfriend, the daughter of the pastor we were working with (originally from California).  I'm also keen on hitch-hiking, and my housemate Colin and I undertook a sponsored hitch-hike to Scotland to help fund that first trip out there.  

After A-levels I did a year working in industry with The Year in Industry (www.yini.org.uk) which was a brilliant experience.  You can see what I got up to here: My Year in Industry

I am a Christian, and as this is the most important thing in my life, you can read all about it on a separate page: My Faith

Although I’m not a great reader, I have come across some brilliant books.  You might find these interesting: My Books

I am a fairly well-rounded individual, and among my interests I create interesting spreadsheets in Excel, and play the guitar after a fashion.  See My Music page for some song chords.  I finally got into Windows Movie Maker, and I've set up a link page to all the videos I've uploaded: My Videos.  

I was very chuffed to be allowed a link from Wikipedia to a page I created in homage to Mr Bean's Teddy, and, in between times, I have been taking the chance to do some teaching practice at various schools.