Profile

When I was young I was rabidly interested in science in general and astronomy in particular, and wanted to be an astronomer. I loved Doctor Who, Thunderbirds and Blake's Seven.

For various reasons I ended up pursing engineering as a career instead and spent 4 years at Imperial College where I ended up running IC Science Fiction Society and reading vast amounts of SF. The most exciting opportunities to apply my MEng in Electronics Engineering seemed to be in the military so liking planes I joined the RAF as an engineering officer. I ended up doing this for seventeen years, for most of which my dealings with actual aircraft were as blips on radars or entries in spares databases. But I did get to fly satellites, work as an intelligence analyst, run my own little satellite ground station and have rockets fired at me three times a week for four months in Iraq. I still read lots of SF and ended up helping out at or running several conventions and being Chair of the Science Fiction Foundation for six years.

During this time I got interested in law (long and messy story) and did a law degree with the Open University. I enjoyed this enough that I set out on a complete career change and having hung up my uniform I set out to get a wig and gown instead. After an LLM in geeky law at the University of Edinburgh, the Bar Course in London and a year at Queen Mary looking at legal issues of cloud computing I became a pupil barrister in Birmingham and finally qualified fully at the start of 2012.

I now live in Birmingham with darth_hamster and far too many books.