Immediately after finishing my MSc in Artificial Intelligence course in summer 1989 I got a job at Kingston Poly (soon to be university) as Research Assistant on an European Union project run by PG who had been the director of the MSc course. It was the first step in an odyssey around technology and education (as the O Level Latin title nearly says) that would go on for the rest of my working life.
The global omens were good - Nelson Mandela was released in February 90 after 27 years in prison, heralding the final end of the Apartheid era in South Africa. It doesn’t often happen that true justice is achieved by a true hero in this complex world but this was a clear case. It made my heart sing.
I didn’t have much idea what I was supposed to be doing in my new job and PG was very busy and really just wanted me to be his representative at concertation meetings with EU partners held in boring places like Brussels. He was magically a lot less busy when later meetings were held by Lake Como in Italy and the Rio Tejo in Lisbon. Luckily I got to go with him on those trips too.
The project was supposed to be designing an intelligent ‘workbench’ to support industrial training needs. Very few of the people involved in it had any experience in industrial training, particularly not me. Nevertheless I spent the first few weeks of the project writing a report which I managed to circulate to all 5 partner organisations with the misspelled title ‘Functional Specifictions for the System’ (the malapropism turned out to be more appropriate than I realised at the time).
In Brussels I got to see a) the statue of the Mannekin Pis and b) groups of hungry south European tourists roaming the streets at 10pm (dinner time in Italy, Spain, Portugal etc.) looking for a restaurant that hadn’t closed by 9pm (dinner time in Brussels).
At Lake Como I experienced magical scenery and delicious food. In Lisbon I wandered down whole streets of houses clad in extravagantly decorative tiles (azulejos). And ate sardines.
I had some highly enjoyable and convivial lunches with PG and our colleagues from Germany, Italy and Portugal, and sat through a number of presentations on intelligent systems architectures which were illustrated by diagrams that looked like stacks of film cans that had been used for archery practice. PG argued socratically with everyone (he was Greek after all) and spent hours passionately defending preposterous theoretical assertions that even I could see were probably bullshit. I did learn that ‘workbench’ in IT-speak was not a place where you sat to do your work - it was a human-computer interaction concept that could be manifested across multiple architectures. Needless to say, we never actually built anything.
At the end of 1990 my cup ranneth over as Margaret Thatcher was hounded out of office by her own party, having become an electoral liability following the riotous and failed attempt to introduce a flat rate Poll Tax in place of local rates. It was a less edifying moment than Mandela’s release but I and millions of others still exulted as she was driven away blubbing in the back of her limousine with Dennis grinning inanely beside her.
Early in 91 I made the decision to try for a PhD and registered at the Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology. I would be a full time student with a maintenance grant from SERC, although I was allowed to carry on working part-time for Kingston, now doing the occasional lecture in Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems as well as writing reports for PG’s ailing project. As I was technically a full time student I was also entitled to a Young Persons Railcard to enable me to travel to Milton Keynes and back cheaply. (My mother fell about laughing when I told her I was an official Young Person, at the age of 43). For the next two years I divided my time between Milton Keynes where I sat upstairs on ancient green double decker buses trundling interminably through building sites and round deserted roundabouts, Kingston where I struggled to stay one page ahead of the students in the Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems handbook, and home where I wrote programs in Visual Basic designed to teach English to Spanish speakers and vice versa, and watched TV footage of American laser-guided bombs ‘surgically’ targeting Saddam Hussein’s war machine, including 480 unlucky civilians sheltering in a bunker in Amiriyah.
In September 1992 home became a two-up two-down 19th century terraced cottage just across the Harrow road in W10. It was our first freehold property - originally a council house sold for a pittance to its tenants by Westminster council in obedience to Thatcherite housing policy/political strategy and then sold on to us at current market rates (about £75k if I recall). We had to up our mortgage quite a bit but figured we could just about afford it. We completed the purchase on the day Britain crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the loan rate shot up to 15% for a few hours, causing us not a few palpitations.
The new house came with a small backyard with a border garden which, when we moved in, had nothing living growing in it, not even weeds. But Steph is green-fingered and this was a chance to create her own garden from scratch. Berta, who lived nearby and was also a keen gardener helped by giving us a jar of healthy and industrious worms as a housewarming present. Over the next few years a riot of planting sprang into life - gardening had entered my world where it has remained and helped to shape my understanding of what home is really about.
We shopped at multi-ethnic food stores along the Harrow Rd and at Sainsbury’s at the top of Ladbroke Grove. Beef burgers were off the menu as BSE had infected Britain’s cattle farms (only 2 years after we had been warned of salmonella in all our eggs). The Government insisted beef was safe of course and to prove it Minister of Agriculture John Gummer tried to get his 4-year-old daughter Cordelia to eat a burger on TV. She wouldn’t eat it, so he did, but Cows continued to go mad and over the next few years four million were slaughtered and burned on huge pyres throughout the land. 177 people died of a human variant of the disease. British beef was banned in several countries.
In 1993 I attended my first international academic conference. It was in Williamsburg, Virginia. When I showed the university tech support people my overhead projector slides they were perplexed. They weren’t sure they still had an OHP - everyone else was using digital data projectors by then. Outside the university Williamsburg was busy pretending to be still in the 17th century - half the town’s population were employed to dress up like characters in a Vermeer painting and show tourists around the wig-makers workshop and the candle factory. My stay there was prolonged by several days due to a freak snowstorm all along the eastern seaboard which caused the cancellation of my flight.
Towards the end of 93, just as my studentship was coming to an end, I got a job as a Research Associate at Aston University working on another European project this time to do with using new technology for language learning. This was something I considered I did know something about by now, the only problem was - Aston is in Birmingham. It was agreed that I could work at the university for 3 days a week, at home in London for 1 day a week, and on writing up my PhD for 1 day a week. That meant I could be at home from Friday to Monday, get a coach from Victoria to Birmingham on Monday night, stay in a university hall of residence for 3 nights, and get the coach back to London on Thursday night.
The first time I sat on the coach and saw the Birmingham skyline appear across the fields of Warwickshire it seemed to me like a fabled city. But my stay there was not to be a happy one.
