Photo courtesy of the Urban Myths Website
I first wrote this text as an address to ex-Long Eaton Grammar School colleagues - but Friends Reunited only gives you one entry no matter how many schools and companies you sign up for and limits you to 5,000 words total.
So - this page is for anyone who shared a school with me or worked with me. You can read it, have a good chuckle in the Devil's IT Dictionary about me, and then forget me for another few decades.
First school; St Joseph's Roman Catholic Primary in Cromwell Road, Derby - it was later a Hindu cultural centre, now four rows of terraced town houses. My right knee is permanently chipped from genuflection. Marked down as a troublemaker on day one - Sister Fimbar, taking the induction class on the first day, started to teach us how to cross ourselves in the approved Catholic manner. She did it in reverse, knowing that 5-year-olds would copy her mirror fashion. But one little sod in the front row didn't. This offence was compounded when the priest told us at Sunday school that all good Catholics should choose saint's names for their children - the same little sod asked why we aren't all called "Peter".
Things have continued in that vein, resulting in me having a bunch of friends that circulate highly ironic emails - the funniest come from a retired Swiss living in Spain whom I worked for in Frankfurt - he once came back to the Frankfurt office from an exercise with the Swiss Army forgetting he had a 0.5" anti-tank machine gun and 300 rounds in the boot. The most obscene come from an eighty year old female fellow analyst who lives in Florida surrounded by a moat filled with alligators. She'd been burgled a couple of times. Then there's the stuff that Scott Adams just daren't print in Dilbert. Especially the bit about the finger and the ear.
Hothoused through the 11-plus - sitting mocks twice a week for a year - I got the second highest score recorded in Derbyshire. Big mistake - I was marked down as an academic, which I never was. But it helped later on. Went to Derby School - supposedly the best in the town - and hated it even more than it hated me. Bullied mercilessly. A truly awful place - Loopy Sommerville taught history with an ancient size 12 tennis shoe on the desk - any transgression he didn't like and you got thrashed. It wasn't so much the thrashing, but the brutality of being held over a desk by the neck and the sheer violence of the event. At eleven, terrifying. Pettigrew, the sports master, liked walking among naked 11-year-olds just out of the shower with a table tennis bat. The headmaster, Norman Elliott (obviously known as "Bog") was inordinately found of his cane, and senior pupils - ludicrously called "praeposters" - were sometimes allowed to use corporal punishment as well. Margaret Thatcher wasn't all bad - she shut the place down.
Am I jaundiced in my opinion? It seems not - Friends Reunited lists so few for my year (just seven) that it can get four years onto one web page. Long Eaton Grammar School lists 118 for the same year and takes three pages to display them all. A lot of people, it seems, do not like to be reminded about Derby School.
A brutal place indeed. Certain individuals should beware of attending Derby School reunions.
Moved to LEGS at 14 - a complete revelation, not least because it was co-educational. In fact, more than that - us males were in a minority. It can't be half so much fun now that Trent College is co-educational as well - in my day it sucked out most of the competition. Why were all the girls gorgeous, or nearly so? Was it really nearly always sunny in those days?
Of course, I remained a troublemaker. My first formroom was one of the old music huts down by the Golden Brook; one day it was raining and Mr Picton - our form master - was late. To get these dear girls in out of the rain, I picked the lock with a bit of scaffolding wire I just happened to have handy. Boys' pockets. Thereafter that was my party trick for 4C. I still pick locks, but these days only on cars. And in "O" level biology with Mrs Maskell, objecting to the pronoun "it" and proposing "she" in discussions of female physiology. Well, I was seriously outnumbered. I also remember vaulting feet first into our hut through a missing window pane and opening the second door which was only bolted shut. And doing very little homework, if any, throughout my time at LEGS.
Being nominally Catholic got me out of morning assembly, which was quite handy. Thoroughly enjoyed my LEGS years - probably the best crowd I've ever been around. I've had some great work colleagues since then, but there was (almost) no one at LEGS I didn't like - an incredible contrast with Derby School.
Left LEGS with handshakes and little else, and went to Concordia Electric Wire and Cable. A fun six months putting my experimental skills to work in embryonic quality control.
Revisited the Concordia site on 3 December 2005 - the day of Last LEGS. That blue was once so familiar - I hadn't seen it since. On my first day there I had to use a slide rule and a plug-in Wheatstone Bridge - just like the ones in museums. Even then. The old drawing and enamelling works is now a housing estate - the old headquarters seems to be into flexibles only. The remaining buildings across the road seem terribly dilapidated - the backlit sign over the door has been smashed for ages. So much for my career prospects there.
Then I made a fool of every careers master in the country. I went to visit my mother, who'd moved to Wellingborough with her latest beau. On the north side of the centre there's a triangular grass space called Broad Green, and at the top of it is a spectacular late Georgian red ironstone building - mullioned windows, the lot. I decided to take a closer look at the architecture, found it was the Labour Exchange, and decided to take a look inside - a public building, after all.
I came out with an interview that afternoon at Barclays Bank in Northampton as a trainee computer operator. Got the job and moved down to Wellingborough. For those who know Wellingborough my mother's first shop was "Newcomen Corner" - it's now called "Triangular Autos" on Newcomen Road. Then we had shops in Bridge Street, Northampton and Occupation Road, Corby. Lots of fun on the fringes of the antique trade. Crooks, all of them.
Computing was clean, shiny and new - it even smelt that way - and nobody knew what they were doing. There simply were no courses about commercial mainframe computing - all UK computer education was about floating point FORTRAN in universities on ICL hardware. An expert was someone a page ahead of you in the manual. A careers master would never have recommended computing to anyone but a maths genius, but the truth was that there was no maths involved - that's what the machine is for, dummy. We had to develop all of our own techniques for backup, disaster recovery, change management, etc. Very rapidly got promoted to Assembler programmer (the 11-plus hothousing coming in handy - pattern recognition is important in debugging) and wrote about a third of the Barclaycard New Input Suite - 250,000 lines of IBM Assembler in nine months. The limit was supposed to be ten lines a day at the time - but no one told us.
So much for careers masters. My son had much the same experience.
Being a programmer who was also a qualified operator was handy - I was trusted not to break the gear during test sessions. "Here you are, you can borrow this £10 million 17-tonne mainframe for an hour. Don't break it - we're going for coffee." They made me wear a hairnet, though - at the time it reached below my shoulderblades and an IBM 1403 line printer is a vicious beast to get caught up in.
They called it "hands-on". Hadn't managed it until then.
Later on, in sales support, the all-round technical experience came in handy again. As it still does.
Computing was unique in other ways than the hair - it was routine for managers to be younger than their subordinates, and no one thought anything of it. Who knew the most was put in charge. And also routine for a twenty-year-old to be trusted with the keys to the entire St Giles Terrace Barclaycard Centre over a weekend.
Barclays closed Northampton Computer Centre a couple of years later so we started our diaspora - I went to ICL, a software house, Ford, Littlewoods Pools (Dickensian at the time - literally) and the Bank of England, then spent a year rock climbing in Sheffield (soloed Great Harry on Laurencefield above Hathersage one warm summer evening - stone cold sober, too). My office in Blonk Street is now the cocktail bar of the Bristol Hotel. Got to Toronto (Don Mills) for a while, but it was more boring than Long Eaton on a wet Tuesday night. Went off to Germany (Hannover and Frankfurt) for seven years. Still emailing the old neighbours in Germany a couple of decades on - a terrific "Nachbarschaft" - always in and out of each other's houses, drinking each other's beer, barbecueing on each others' lawns and correcting each others' children's grammar. Learnt spoken Japanese (taught in German) at the Volkshochschule in Frankfurt. Brain-bending language - never had to work so hard. Forgotten almost all of it now - never really used it. Went back to Germany (Hamburg/Norderstedt) for another 18 months in 2000.
One of my enduring memories is leaving the Bank of England in the late evening. At that time, the cleaners had swabbed the main entrance floor with wet mops, bringing those wonderful mosaics to life. Few ever get to see then clean and wet. The quiet of the evening. You walked across these spectacular direct copies of the real Roman versions in the basement, and presented yourself to the Duty Messenger.
"Good evening, Mr Payne. Do you need a car?"
"No thanks - taking the Tube to St Pancras."
He would signal a flunkey, and you would follow him into the postern gate in the extreme right door. The door would close behind you with a heavy clank, and he would then survey the street outside. I'm still probably not allowed to say exactly what he did, but there followed a clank-clank-clank as the bolts released. The door swung open, and you were out on Threadneedle Street.
Spent a while in Dacca, Bangladesh. Got to know a genuine Soviet spy (KGB) and partnered him in a round of golf against the western defence attachés at the Bangladesh Naval Academy under absolutely beautiful kapok trees. Never played golf since - I couldn't beat that experience. Couldn't beat Yuri Yakamenko, either. Went to dinner in the Russian compound - caviar, salmon, and vodka. And vodka. Only one of the two Canadians drank - the US Defence Attaché told me the sober one was supposed to shoot the drunk one if he blabbed.
Worked for every mainframe company (ICL, ITEL, NAS/HDS, BASF/Comparex, Amdahl) in the UK, Germany and the USA except IBM, who've recently fallen out with me. Again. Anyone else get megacorporations on their neck every now and then? Keeps life amusing. ITEL was a leasing company and awash with money - all the senior management were Italian and I seriously thought it might be a money-laundering operation for the Mafia. Real gold leaf on the letterheads - £1 a sheet. In 1978. They taught me to use the HP-12C Financial Calculator, which is a Reverse Polish Notation device - I still can't use a "normal" calculator. If it's got an "equals" key - straight in the bin. These days an HP-41CV bought in the early 1980s follows me around. As "European VS1 Specialist" I held the company flying record for a while - 219 landings at Berlin Tegel alone in 19 months - and the Frankfurt-Stuttgart office-to-office Autobahn record at 2 hours 19 minutes. Autobahns redefine boring - Clarkson gets an adrenalin high every year with a quick (and usually illegal) blast. Fact - average speed on German Autobahns is LOWER than average UK motorway speed. Day in, day out - in all weathers - you can keep it.
It was wierd - debugging storage dumps one minute, writing a presentation the next, and then checking someone's net present value calculations on a multi-million dollar lease.
And for the technically minded - it's quite amazing what an electrolytic capacitor the size of a small dustbin can do to a 3mm x 6mm copper busbar in a few milliseconds, which it did one day in Germany.
Corrected a salesman one day, at Spar Giro Verband in Saarbrücken. He'd said we had five machines in West Germany - I said it was four plus one in West Berlin, which wasn't legally part of West Germany. When the customer thanked us, he referred to my comment. "Quite correct. This actual room has special significance - it's where the votes were counted for the plebiscite for the Saarland to return to Germany in 1935. Herr Hitler sat over there, Herr Dr Goebbels over there .."
Worked for Morino Associates, later called Legent and now part of Computer Associates in St Albans and Vienna, VA. Went to an "Eat all you can for $6.95" Alaskan King Crab festival at Seven Corners, VA, and was pink for a fortnight. Bright pink. Really, really bright pink. Mario Morino got $600 million from CA and is still the only multi-millionaire I'd buy a drink for. And have. [Since I originally wrote that, he's emailed to comment that he did return the favour. As I recall, we both did. Many times.] At Morino I discovered I wasn't at all the mathematical dunce I'd been continuously told I was at LEGS - Dr H Pat Artis taught me the basics of statistics in one afternoon. Two months later I was teaching summarization and n-dimensional cluster analysis in English _and_ German. And SAS is a lovely language - I still use it. And IBM's REXX. And HTML (this piece, for instance), and PHP, and XML, and Java ...
The IBM plug-compatible business was fun. One day I realised I had more shelf space devoted to European competition law than to software. Helped with preparation of our case for the Competitions Directorate (DG IV) that resulted in IBM's 1984 Undertaking to the EEC. Their lawyers haven't liked me since. Not many people get letters like this one. Our corporate counsel defined his job as:
I picked up the term "rat-fucking" from Bernstein and Woodward's Book All the President's Men and used some of the techniques:
It got nasty one Christmas. Someone rang all our wives and told them their husbands were having affairs. Most of us laughed it off, but one lad really was having one. He admitted it, asked his wife to forgive him, and was sitting on his suitcases in the gutter an hour later. The same guy was driving down the M4 a year or so later when his mobile phone stopped working. He called the provider who said it was discontinued because of his redundancy. So he left his company BMW at the next services with the keys in the ignition and hitched home. Fun business.
Finally (because of the marketing stunts) got head-hunted by Amdahl - probably the toughest firm to get into in 1985 - and the toughest to stay in - and spent seven happy years there. Chief european spy (they called it "Commercial Analysis") under the cover of being Services Marketing Manager. Which I also did, but it only took an hour a day. We still meet up in Midlands pub every few months. Went to the inaugural meeting of the UK Computer Measurement Group and was too slow to get out of the way - wound up on the Programme Committee and thence, in stages, to Vice-Chairman. Presented a paper at every one of the first ten Annual Conferences, mostly on storage topics but sometimes on futures. Held the record for the shortest presentation - everyone else ran late and I stood up at 17:48 to talk for an hour on solid state disc emulation - with the bar opening at 18:00 and 1,200 thirsty mathematicians in the audience. Twelve minutes is still a record. Rented the "Pink Flamingo" nightclub in Brighton for sponsored entertainment one year - once the ink was dry the proprietor asked who was coming. I replied: "1,200 statisticians." He said: "Oh God, I was depending on decent bar receipts." You guessed it.
Wound up - for complicated reasons - in Alma Ata (now called Almaty) in the old Soviet Union and threw a nominal rock over the border into China. Went down the hotel fire escape from the "western" floor and found another door open, and went in. Found a bunch of East Germans and had a chat. We compared incomes, expenditures, etc. Then I asked a question, in German: "Was kostet dieser Spaß?" - "What does this fun cost?" The answer was: "The trip cost DM(E)n - the fun costs a bottle of vodka per evening" - pointing at the comatose Russian Intourist minder with the empty bottle on the floor beside him. Tried out the open air Olympic ice rink - the world's highest, largest and bleakest - on borrowed speed skates.
Ex-LEGS people seem predisposed to travel. I wonder how many other schools have lists like this.
Very early on the Internet. Within days, in fact. We were desperate for some effective global-scope networking system for engineers to use in the field and I'd spent huge resources on X25 dial-up. Almost by-the-bye, we'd connected our internal email system to JANET - the Joint Academic NETwork - so we could talk to our UK university customers and when it hooked up with ARPANET to form the Internet we were right there. Anyone remember FTP "mirror sites" - mostly at Imperial College? No one seems to give a damn about bandwidth these days.
Invited to join the legendary Canopus forum on CompuServe and got up to my tits in the famous Steve Barkto affair. Spotted both the three-dot ellipsis and the "then for than" lexical oddity. But we're still friends. There's even a Barkto news site dedicated to the affair, but these days we just use it for baiting ultra-right American neocon Christian fundamentalist rednecks. Anyone can join in.
Early Demon user - the first company to offer Internet access to the hoi polloi - and now operator of five websites. Latest wrinkle is Google sitemaps - ugh. As one of the musicians at the Woodseats jam session (see below) said on stage at the end of a number: "They say you learn something every day, and I just learned that one."
Got heavily involved in the only Internet libel case ever fought in the UK - Dr Godfrey vs Demon Internet - as a principal witness for the complainant. Preparing a "witness statement" for the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court is no easy task. It makes me laugh when people threaten to sue me for libel (which they do, occasionally) because it costs around £200k to get into court and there's no legal aid for libel. Perry Mason is ludicrous - if you whip a rabbit out of a hat in front of a High Court judge like he does every week, you'll go straight to jail for contempt - wasting the court's time with something you should have told them about a LOT earlier. If you want to take a look, the discussions of the period are in the Usenet archive. There's more than enough to bore you rigid. Before Mr Justice Morland (the Bulger case judge) and Mr Justice Eady in Court 13. All that matters - we won. Well, they caved in when Eady J., during the pre-trial, quite brilliantly pointed out a minor hole in their case. That you could drive a bus through. Sideways. With a brass band on top. There never was a judgement, which is a shame - some important issues could have been cleared up for ever.
Now have my own computer industry analyst business which means I get to chat with the great and good (and bad) of the computing industry and perplex them with my ignorance. I'm known for being a bit outspoken at times! Have started to shut it down - there's no longer any money in it - and will go into web site analysis and optimisation. A field currently strewn with idiots. The Kingdom of the Blind applies.
http://www.isham-research.co.uk/press.html has some of my press quotes (in seven languages, only three of which I speak) and an interview I gave in May 2005 to BBC Radio Five DriveTime. Beware - it's 14MB. No - I don't carry it around on my MP3 player to play to strangers. I was lying on my back under a car in a darkened garage at the time - they give you very little notice but the experience was fascinating - sound tests, being "patched to the sound desk", coached by the director and then the countdown to air while the BBC correspondent did the lead-in. All in nine minutes. They don't tell you it's live until the very last minute. What with the Internet and satellite services they reckon the potential audience was 680 million - they used the tape several times that evening, including on Radio 2 and Radio 4. I got an email from Australia and several from Canada. I wonder if they'd have done it if they could have seen where I was. Or what I looked like at the time - sometimes radio IS better.
I also did a television interview about twenty years back in Germany for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen at the Hannover Fair but that was recorded and we did several takes because my stomach kept rumbling and upsetting the sound man. Funny thing - when I lived in Hannover (2 years) I managed to take holiday for the Hannover Fair week, but when I lived in Frankfurt (5 years) I got sent up on stand duty every year. There's no justice. But there was once an incident involving a grandfather clock full of teabags and a girl with very prominent nipples wearing a string vest. March is sometimes quite cold in Hannover.
I've been told that Wall Street will crash if I ever appear in public without sandals. LEGS people may remember me with a beard in the sixth form when I got burned at home in a chip pan fire. It could have been worse. Well, I shaved it off for the first time in in 2001. Wandered into the local pub (at the time, the Lilacs in Isham, Northants) and expected to be told: "You look ten years younger". The consensus was 15 years - so it's stayed off and I've had to learn how to shave. Messy, dangerous business. Used to get wound up about "clean" as an automatic adjunct to "shaven" - can the hair on the bottom of a face come out of a shower any dirtier than the hair on the top?
Specialisation is setting up business partnerships between US and European companies. No fixed abode - home is where this Nokia Communicator is - though I have bases in Frankfurt, Ann Arbor (near Detroit) and a nice flat in Sheffield Woodhouse.
Still talk Kraut for a third of each day.
They call us "Inselaffen", by the way. Island apes. Only not when we're listening.
Married Sarah (first cousin - mothers were sisters), divorced in 1999. She ran off with a bell-ringing tax inspector, which my kids tell me - to my eternal shame - is no better than a train-spotting taxidermist. She's put on five or six stone since, so she must be happy. Gave me two great kids.
Son Thomas was born in 1980 and is just like his father (though I suspect he has a higher IQ - he catches me out regularly) and settled in Nottingham, engaged to a lovely girl who has a PhD in chemical engineering and marrying in Bali (where she comes from) in April 2008. Supercritical fluids, no less. She looks much too nice. Tom and I both have almost shaven heads - it took us quite a while to realise we clear just about every pub we walk into together.
Daughter Jenni was born in 1982 (ran Top Shop in Kettering for a while, but is now in the NHS) and now married to a long-term boyfriend in Kettering. Not at all like her mother. More like mine, who had a chain of shops in Northamptonshire supplying standard furniture sets to the DSS for rehoming battered women, and collecting potties, sewing machines and marble washstands to ship to the USA. Then she ran The Sun in Broughton for a while until she went broke. Died in 1992. My father, of course, committed suicide while I was in the Fifth Form at LEGS.
They say you should never go back. A while ago, on my way to a LEGS reunion, I went to see the bungalow at Borrowash that we lived in while I was there. They're right - you should never go back. UGH!
Never spent a day in hospital, but was diagnosed NIDDM eight years ago. You're supposed to be obese to get that, but I never have been. I only weigh just over a stone more than I did at LEGS. Never smoked - needed all the money for booze. Remember being stunned when I saw one of the most intelligent people I knew with a cigarette for the first time. Nearly been killed a few times - a bad landing in a BAC 1-11 at Hannover, struck by lightning taking off from Stuttgart, engine explosion at Malton Field, Toronto, a desperate situation on Shepherd's Crag in the Lakes, and rolling a Ford Granada end-over-end seven times on the Sherington Bypass near Newport Pagnell in February 1989. Cleared the fence completely. 230 metres from the carriageway - the first copper on the scene said: "Where's the body?" "You're talking to it." Eight miles from the M1, but they still exhibited the remains on the exit from the northbound Newport Pagnell services with a sign on it: "Tiredness Kills". At 06:00 after a good night's sleep? Hit by a plummeting swan in Frankfurt - it flew into the tramwires on a bridge over the Main. Messy business; they carry a lot of ballast. Wrote the car off. Rang the insurance company (HUK Coburg) and they said: "OK - we'll send you the swan damage form."
Politics? I marched against the attack on Iraq. A truly wonderful day full of little cameos, like a dozen or so Socialist Worker activists behind three huge trestle tables groaning with socialist literature being comprehensively and utterly ignored by two million people. It was going OK until Jesse Jackson started, then I went to Bruce Forsyth's pub and watched the rugby.
Photo courtesy of the Urban Myths Website
Can't get my mind around people waiting desperately for retirement - there's so much going on and they pay you to play! People who retire get old quickly - the actuarial life expectancy of a retired RAF officer is just nineteen months! Retire and die?
My web site is http://www.isham-research.co.uk - be sure to check out the Devil's IT Dictionary - suggestions are VERY welcome. No, my sense of humour hasn't changed much. Yes, it used to be a .com address but I changed the TLD to .co.uk because some of the search engines thought I was in Germany. Incredibly - for both of us - it's one of the top 100,000 sites on the World Wide Web.
Hobbies:
Generally to be found at the Broadfield on Abbeydale Road in Sheffield on Friday evenings for the rock session. The Howard (by the railway station) hosts a solid gig on Mondays and a jam session on Thursdays that competes with the formal gigs at the White Lion, Heeley Bottom. Check by phone if you expect to meet me - quattros take precedence and the season is well under way.
Here's one some will find hard to believe - I found an old photograph of me with a sticker on the back - "Sunday Dispatch Beautiful Child of the Year Competition". Don't think I won.
As I was then. Simon Gilmore of the Audi Club says I look a lot like Charlton Heston - something my female fellow pupils unanimously failed to notice.
As I am now - most recent snap - I'm the one on the right.
And a footnote. Someone looked at this page and commented that it was "a bit me, me, me". Well, it's a "biography". But she's a Sheffield lass.
Anyway, email is phil@isham-research.co.uk and the poserphone is 07833 654800.