April 2023

March 2023 So, I ignored my own advice in the January ramble about not sending people to Mars and created a small settlement on the Red Planet called Karima-Napata. (I know it sounds like the famous Swahili catchphrase from the Lion King, but might that also make it easier to remember?) In Anything But Accidental,

February 2023 I had already started cobbling together something for this month inspired by a very good article about ChatGPT (my favourite bit being a funny story about photocopier software) which has been in the mainstream news, hasn’t it? Everyone seems to be asking if, from now on, teachers will ever know if their students have really written

January 2023 In the context of the current war in Ukraine, remembering the space race of the 1960s seems to take me back to an age of innocence. I know there were crises and that most of us felt the threat of nuclear war looming over us at one time or another before Reagan and

Newsletter – December 2022/January 2023 First of all, apologies for mucking about with the newsletter day of the week again! It’s a bit all over the place at the moment. One of the reasons is that I’ve just added the second novel of the series, published only a few days ago, to one of these

Newsletter – November 2022 At last, we’ll soon be heading back into space! It seems a long time since I uploaded The Big G as a free giveaway to blaze the trail, and yet the second full-length novel, due to be published next month, is set before the events on Ganymede and was mostly written

Newsletter – October 2022 Unlike my three brothers, I inherited my mother’s sweet tooth, and though I hated most of the school dinners I was ‘forced’ to eat as a boy – employing contrived methods of avoiding doing so – I loved the stodgy, sticky puddings. And I have always been a sucker for almost

Newsletter – September 2022 After a freakishly long dry – and hot! – spell, someone must have looked at the calendar, seen that it was autumn and finally decided to send some serious rain to Cantabria. This apparently endless summer had given us the time we needed to get agreement from the residents’ committee to

Newsletter – August 2022 As well as anticipating at least one of my future ‘careers’, my final year undergraduate degree project with the promising title ‘Computer Programming for Flow over Side Weirs’ granted me access to the university Computer Centre. I remember it as a circular building, though perhaps it was octagonal. More importantly, it

Newsletter – July 2022 A while ago, I was thinking back to when I studied what used to be called ‘computing’ and people wrote programs. In those primitive times, when only Macs (nobody talked about ‘Apple’) had graphical user interfaces, I remember once using what we thought was a pretty funky language called prolog to