How long have you worked at the Uni? What does your role involve?
I started working at the University in autumn 2016 as a Press Officer, mainly dealing with Humanities and Social Sciences. Then in early-2017, I became the University’s Freedom of Information Officer, a role I now share. We’re responsible for handling around 400 FOI requests each year, getting information from departments and responding within a 20 day deadline.
I dealt with FOI quite a lot in previous jobs and I’ve been a member of a government body which dealt, in part, with FOI as well.
What would you most like to achieve while at the University?
I think it would be a greater awareness that freedom of information isn’t just a matter for the FOI team or senior management. Everyone who works here could be asked for information and has a legal obligation to provide it, to help us provide our responses. It’s the law so it has to be done!
We have a guide which has lots of information about dealing with FOI requests which staff will find useful.
Name one thing that makes you feel proud to work at the University of Bath?
The work that’s been done across so many different departments to make people’s lives, here and abroad, better and improve their existence. Whether that’s something like tackling cancer, epidemics, or the growing social problem of loneliness amongst older people.
What piece of advice would you like to give to a student?
To not lose touch with friends from university, whatever the distractions they may encounter in the next 10, 20, 30 years of relationships, children and careers.
Who was your most influential teacher/educator, and why?
Jerry White is a Professor at Birkbeck College, where I did a postgraduate degree in History quite recently. He is one of the country’s premier experts on London’s past and he supervised my dissertation. He changed career in his middle age to become a historian after being a very senior official in local government. That has inspired me to realise I can change course, I can do different things and it has prompted a longer-term interest, for me, in history. I think it’s really important when people are living so much longer that people, whether they’re in their 40s, 50s or 60s, realise that they can do different things. There are fresh opportunities out there.
What was your first job?
I was a very junior reporter on the Oxford Mail. It’s the same newspaper that keeps cropping up in Inspector Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, where they only seem to have one journalist in the entire programme. I worked there in the prehistoric era of typewriters, before mobile phones and computers, and even before fax machines. It was the days when local newspapers actually sold copies, rather than having everything online for free!
If you could start your own dream business, what would it be?
A bookshop with a café, which is probably a middle class fantasy, as is the idea of making a bookshop viable. I think the café would probably do much better, especially with competitors like Amazon.
Where is your favourite holiday destination and why?
We went to New Zealand for Christmas and the New Year. It was so like the UK in so many respects, but so unlike the UK in many others, with its Maori population, earthquakes, and very different wildlife and landscape. I think that would be a prime contender, as well as Barcelona and Catalonia.
What’s your favourite book or album and why?
There is a Bruce Springsteen album called Wrecking Ball (not the Miley Cyrus one!) which I keep coming back to when I’m in the car. I’ve only seen Springsteen once at the London 2012 Olympic Park in 2013 and it was just wonderful. He had just produced Wrecking Ball, which I think is terrific, and he also played the entire Born to Run album in the album order. The concert lasted for 3 hours, it was extraordinary! I almost don’t want to see him again, because it could never be so good. It was a temporary venue, so the crowd was smaller than usual, putting me within a stone’s throw of Springsteen.
When are you happiest?
In our Somerset garden in the summer sun, having a meal with my wife Jane. That’s when everything seems right with the world.
If you could meet anyone in the world dead or alive who would it be and why?
Less seriously, David Cameron to ask him what on earth he was thinking of during the referendum campaign in 2016 and why he did the things he did.
More seriously, I’m fascinated by the idea that history can turn on one moment, or someone dying or being born. The notion that some single event can have a domino effect. So I’d probably choose Senator Robert Kennedy, who, if he hadn’t been assassinated, might well have become the American President in 1969. If he had, there’s every chance there would have been no President Nixon, a shorter Vietnam War, and not every scandal would have had “gate” attached to its name because there wouldn’t have been Watergate. Conversely, President Reagan might not have been elected, so there might have been no President Gorbachev and then no end to communism in Eastern Europe and no Berlin Wall coming down.
I think he’s an extraordinary figure who could have changed the world for the better, but we’ll never know.
Which one superpower would you like to possess?
Time travel. I’ve got a postgraduate degree in history and I’m currently doing a social media project ‘live tweeting’ the news from 1819 to commemorate the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, of what we’d now call pro-democracy demonstrators. You can find that on Twitter @Live1819.
It would be amazing to be able to talk to some of the people who were involved then to find out what their aspirations were and whether they were surprised by the way things have developed. That said, I once saw a film called Timeline, starring Billy Connolly, where some people from the 2000s got stuck in the Middle Ages. They were right in the middle of warfare between England and France, so this has to be a return ticket with guaranteed immunity from illness, injury or death.
What would people be surprised to learn about you?
I was heavily involved in the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games. First of all, working for the government and the Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell, and going to the International Olympic Committee meeting which chose London to be the venue. I then became Head of Communications for the Olympic Delivery Authority, which was the body responsible for building the venues and infrastructure for the games. I managed to spend the best part of 10 years working on the Olympics which is an opportunity I didn’t expect to have.
Tell us your favourite joke
I read a while ago that people sometimes get asked to tell a joke at job interviews. I’ve kept this one by my side, but no one has ever asked me to deliver it!
Two aerials meet on a roof. They fall madly in love and decide to get married. The wedding ceremony isn’t up to much but the reception is terrific.