Lincolnshire, England
Greetings and welcome to my web site. I produced my own web page for the first time on Thursday 12th December 1996 and I seem to have been working on additions almost daily since then! Since then the site has received at least 18,000,000 hits, and at present has over 500,000 visits per month.
I am a retired Physics teacher, formerly Head of Computing at Charterhouse in Surrey, having taken early retirement in July 1996. My occupation was until recently was as a self-employed Physics and Mathematics Tutor, but I have now fully retired. I am still an Examiner in Physics at A-level for Edexcel (formerly also at GCSE level for AQA), and am also a Churchwarden and a Lay Minister for the North Beltisloe Group of Parishes.
I have three main hobbies: collecting coins (principally UK, Canadian and Roman); collecting stamps (principally Italy, Italian Colonies and GB); and a long-standing love of canals, which I and my family used to navigate in a 19-ft Dawncraft Dandy cabin cruiser called 'Linton', until we finally sold her in 2004. For some of our early adventures have a look at our BCN Trips pages.
My wife and I chose the name 'Linton' because we were married in Linton-in-Threshfield Parish Church in the Yorkshire Dales, and Linton Lock on the River Ouse, also in Yorkshire, is famous for its unusual history.
I have made a special study of the long derelict Shrewsbury and Newport Canals, and a selection of photographs of these and many other waterways are available on the website www.tonycanalpics.co.uk.
My main sporting activity is rifle shooting, and for the past fifteen years I have had the honour of being the Chief Range Officer on Century Range, one of the largest in the world, for the National Rifle Association's Annual Imperial Meeting at Bisley. I am also Vice-Chairman of the Old Malvernian Rifle Club, Member of The General Council of the National Rifle Association and, until my move to Lincolnshire in 2005, Captain of the Farncombe and Godalming Rifle Club. Since the move I have become a member of the Springfield (Ancaster) Rifle and Pistol Club and the Sleaford Rifle Club. I am a Vice-President of the British Schools Small-Bore Rifle Association, and organise their Veterans Match.
I have also had the honour to be selected to officiate as Chief Range Officer for the Full-Bore Target Rifle events in the 2002 Commonwealth Games, for the 2003 World Long-Range Target Rifle Championships (known as the Palma), and the 2004, 2006 and 2008 European Long-Range Target Rifle Championships, all held at Bisley.
I am a fully qualified High Muzzle Energy Range Conducting Officer Assessor.
The computer I used to use for many years was an Acorn StrongArm RiscPC, which has not only its own operating system (RISCOS) but has a 586 co-processor so that I could use it as an IBM machine with Windows if I really want to. It would do this both in a fully dedicated mode, where the machine behaves exactly like a 586 IBM machine, or in dual mode with Windows in a standard Acorn window running at the same time as my usual Acorn programs. I have now gone over to a Windows XP machine running VirtualAcorn-SA, which means I run all my old RISCOS programs on a PC, and can switch to the programs such as Mozilla Firefox which are run best on a Windows PC.
I have created a number of web pages:
These pages are continually being updated as more information comes to hand.
A variety of links to my own and other users' pages which I have found to be of interest can be found on my Links Page.
