In the dark days of winter it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of one’s achievements. This is just a personal list of things to remind myself that I’m not utterly useless or unlucky.
- S39 – a new ‘flagship’ studio for World Service News & Current Affairs that I helped design, test and install. I wrote the instruction book for it, and I did my last ever World Service transmission as a Studio Manager in it. I love it. I feel towards it like the Doctor does to the TARDIS. I understand that the mixing desk will live on, in Scotland which makes me happy. I had been worried that it would be scrapped.
- I wrote a book. Yes, it’s very short but I actually started and finished a book and some people seem to like it.
- I designed a working font.
- I built a web site from scratch for someone using PHP and SQL that allowed them to upload their own audio showreel and edit the site on a web page. I have no idea how I did it, but I did.
- Sometimes I take a photo I’m really happy with.
- I invented a super-delicious recipe for pumpkin soup.
- I got to spend a day in the Private Eye office on press day earlier this year, and I met Ian Hislop, Richard Ingrams and Tony Rushton. They were all lovely. Childhood dream come true.
- I got to drive a small truck coast-to-coast across America in 2000, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, part of the way on Historic Route 66. I got paid to do this.
- I made an elegant dual-boot WindowsXP and Mac OS X netbook for under £300 – a lot of trial and error was involved in this, but it’s a wonderfully useful thing.