About me

My university destination was Emmanuel College, Cambridge where I mostly read English and American Literature but sat exams in Maths and Computer Science. Despite my love of literature, science was really my first intellectual affair and she's still the mistress I trust the most and return to when no-one's looking. (I'm not sure where this metaphor is leading me.) Computer Science was a lucky break - I had intended to study maths for three years but found the Cambridge maths tripos simply TOO HARD and so changed course at the end of my first year. Strangely, although I never had nightmares when I was at Cambridge, after I left I frequently had bad dreams about the maths tripos exams coming up in a few weeks and I hadn't done any work all year. 

While at Cambridge I spent a couple of summers working for Acornsoft, which was developing software for Acorn's new BBC Microcomputer (the Beeb). I wrote a program which solved the recently launched Rubik's cube and Acornsoft published it in 1982. My first commercial mistake was accepting a lump sum payment for it from Acornsoft rather than negotiating a royalty. At that time there was very little software for the Beeb and everything that Acornsoft published sold in the many thousands.

In the summer of 1981 I spent three months in Israel working on kibbutz Shamir (click here for its website but it's in Hebrew). It was a wonderful experience. I loved working outside in a hot country but it was the life on the kibbutz that made the biggest impression on me. I was amazed that life could be lived without any money and I realised just how much of our western lifestyles is dictated by the need or desire for money to spend. I have many treasured memories of those months and I learnt more in Israel about life and myself than in any other three months. Whether it is still the same there today I don't know. The spectacles factory that was barely running when I was there was recently floated on Wall Street, making the kibbutzniks of Shamir rather rich.

On graduating, I took a programming job with ICL in Reading, but I didn't like ICL and I didn't like Reading. Having been spoilt by working on the state-of-the-art Acorn computers, I was set to work on an ancient design of computer inherited by ICL from Singer, the sewing machine company. There was no future in that machine and I didn't see much future in ICL. Fortunately there were lots of openings at Acorn. Seemingly unworried about my commercial mistake in accepting a lump sum for Cube Master, Acornsoft hired me as Business Software Editor to learn the art of business my making more mistakes at their expense.

Acorn was an exciting place to work in those days. It was expanding very quickly on the back of the success of the Beeb and there were lots of new projects to work on. My bit of Acornsoft went well, due more to the success of the VIEW word processor and associated programs than my particular business acumen. But Acorn, along with Sinclair and Commodore, crashed and burned in the Christmas season of 1984. In 1983 there had been a much larger demand for home computers than could be satisfied. Determined not to lose business the second time, Acorn and the others manufactured too many, and the excess of stock killed them all at the start of 1985 when the bills came in. Rumour had it that the Dixons group, Acorn's biggest customer, had indicated they would buy 600,000 computers. Acorn cautiously manufactured 400,000 but then Dixons bought 200,000.

Working at Acorn after the crash was less fun. In 1985 there were two rounds of redundancies as Acorn shrank from 450 staff to 250. Before the crash I had anonymously contributed a lot to the Acorn Abuser column on the inside back page of the Acorn User magazine. More than once I'd be sitting in Acorn when the latest Acorn User came out. Seemingly everyone turned to the back page to see who had been made fun of that week and I had to pretend it I didn't know what it said and, yes, wasn't it amusing that XYZ was being called this and no, I couldn't imagine who wrote it. But after the crash it didn't seem right making fun of Acorn generally and my work colleagues in particular so I gave it up.

In 1986 I decided I was big enough and expert enough to launch out on my own and so on May 27th 1986 I became self-employed. I haven't really worked for anyone else since. (Some might say I haven't worked since.) With hindsight it was rather a risk and I didn't give myself much margin for error. I'd decided that I needed just three months living costs as launch capital. Fortunately, after leaving on the Monday, I was re-employed on the Tuesday by Acorn, now as a "software consultant". Consultants are people who charge you to borrow your watch to tell you the time and Acorn paid me twice the rate to do half the work and without all the office politics and phone ringing all the time ("Is that the View expert?". "Not any more it isn't, no.")

My former manager in Acorn didn't like me being immediately re-employed as a consultant and sent memos around about how this was setting a bad example. Fortunately, I had more friends in the place than he did so the memos were duly ignored by the people who counted, leaked to me and laughed at.

There followed 18 months of consultancy and freelance programming. I worked more and more with Mark Colton and on 1st January 1988 we started a new company to develop the PipeDream software that had grown out of the View products. Making and publishing software products was great fun and gave us a comfortable living but it didn't bring us the riches we had anticipated. I worked with Mark until 1993 when we went our separate ways. I returned to consultancy and a bit of programming for about a year and a half and then I met my future wife and moved down to Langley in Berkshire.

I wanted to get away from the computer world and do something new. I realised I couldn't work for anyone else as having been self-employed for about nine years I just didn't have the temperament for it. At a franchise exhibition in London in early 1996 I met Mail Boxes Etc. They had just eight centres running in the UK then. The more I looked at it the more I liked the working environment and there seemed to be a big opportunity. MBE was big worldwide but tiny in the UK. It was plainly going to grow and presumably those in early would have the best opportunities. So on October 24th 1996 I opened the doors of MBE Windsor. In May 2004 I bought the MBE centre in Reading.

During the day I work in my two franchises of Mail Boxes Etc. Their MBE standard websites are here: