I went to university at Girton College, Cambridge University. Girton is therefore seared into my memory and those of my friends as a wonderful place where we grew up and had a lot of laughs. Since we all left and moved to London (mainly), James Casey produced a regular monthly spoof-newsletter called “The Girtonian”, editions of which were sent by royal mail to each Girtonian and were excitedly waited-for and pored over all over London. As time went on the jokes got a bit too close to the bone and some of the more fragile members of the group began to become a little frustrated at Mr Casey.
One rainy Sunday afternoon I decided to put a shot across his bows and created a spoof of the spoof to suggest that The Girtonian had been taken over by new Management and Mr Casey had been shut down… here’s the evidence.

• December 2001, The Girtonian (as zip)
• December 2001, The Girtonian (as Word doc)

Whilst it was commended amongst the readership, I’m not sure I’m that proud of this as it had the unintended effect of stopping Mr Casey from continuing his editorship – I guess I had knocked his position. I was genuinely disappointed because I loved the Girtonian.
We received a new episode just before Christmas 2004 so perhaps there is still hope.

Working as a consultant, I spent 18 months out in Reading building Safedoor.com, a (now-bust) venture spun out of Securicor and designed to be a foray for them into the online secure payments market. Had a fantastic time and part of the fun was getting involved in areas “outside of my expertise” – including helping out with the advertising campaign which was done on the cheap. In this case, a national newspaper (Sunday Times, Observer, Time Out magazine and the Independent on Sunday) full-page spread suggesting that you want to keep your “personal details private”. If only I’d heeded them…

That’s me with the Dyson…

At college, a bunch of us were foolhardy enough to re-enact the Full Monty on stage at the Girton Revue. For the two years previous, recognising that giving any of us a script and asking us to be funny on stage was a non-starter, we’d made instead what best we could out of the comic potential of our bodies; first, the “time-warp” dressed up in drag and secondly, the Spice Girls, dressed as, well girls. Finally, the peak of our careers (and it’s never been this good since), we did the Full Monty…on stage…in front of 200 people…two nights running. And some people thought it was funny.

Advertising the revue, sell out predicted