I set up this simple site to be a place where I can post my thoughts, latest projects and scribblings somewhere public. The reason that I’m doing this is to force me to think about what I write, and to try and get away from my habit of hiding things away on various scraps of paper scattered everywhere.

This is a project that has been more difficult than I imagined. So difficult, that it has taken me almost five years to get to the point where I am ready to publish anything. As normal, life gets in the way of living. Work, family, projects: all manage to sap time away from doing what I actually love to do. This is not to say that I don’t love my family, at least (the other two can sometimes jump off a cliff) but writing actually requires a purpose.

Was it always like this? No, absolutely not.

When I was a lot younger than I am now, I actually considered a career in writing. Words have an effect on me that not many other things do. I remember sitting with the Welsh poet, Gillian Clarke who explained with passion why she loved the word “mildew” when she was a little girl. For me, it’s exactly the same. When I mention Gillian, it’s not that I’m name dropping – it is just that this singular person wrought the most profound change in my attitude to writing. She probably had more to do with my love of literature, in more than one language, than anyone else. And I have never told her that.

However, my love affair with writing was cut short after a disastrous crash with “To Kill a Mockingbird” which changed my future forever and cast me into the void, or world of many shiny things, that is engineering and technology. What a rich ecosystem of ideas, mathematics, perseverance, experiments and achievements. But also what a desolate void of hard truths, inflexible rules and deadly mistakes.

I’ve always thought that science and engineering – but mostly science – try and explain what we are and why we are here. However literature tries to explain who we are and where we are going. The two are linked and, even though many feel that they never want to touch the other, they cannot live separately.

This does not make me an exemplar or some kind of universal man. As I mentioned before, I was adrift from the cultural world for decades, but as I get older I realise that I need to put things on paper. I could start to write a book (a common tragedy for my generation) but I think for me, the best is to start writing. Full stop.