06 — Personal
Beyond the lab.
Test engineering rewards a particular temperament: pick something hard, prepare properly, and see it through whether or not it's raining. It turns out that temperament doesn't switch off at the lab door.
Finish lines
Things I've crossed.
Land's End to John o' Groats
Cornwall → Caithness · ~1,600 km by bicycleThe full length of Britain, pedal stroke by pedal stroke. Roughly a thousand miles of forecasting, pacing, mechanical sympathy and eating on schedule — a lab manager's event if there ever was one. The weather changed nationality several times; the plan survived.
Olympic-distance triathlon
Ringwood, Hampshire · 1.5 km swim / 40 km bike / 10 km runThree disciplines, three sets of kit, one plan — and no hiding in the transitions. The swim teaches humility, the bike teaches patience, and the run at the end teaches you exactly how honest your pacing was.
Half marathon
Fleet, Hampshire · 21.1 kmThe distance where preparation stops being optional. Fleet's course is a spring classic used by London Marathon hopefuls as a tune-up — quick, honest and unforgiving of anyone who went out too fast.
Spartan Race — 10k
Scotland · 10 km + 25 obstaclesScottish hills, Scottish mud and a course-load of obstacles — walls, carries, rigs and rope climbs, with burpees as the tax on any failure. Grip strength and stubbornness in roughly equal measure.
Tough Mudder
Hampshire · ~16 kmLess a race than a team problem-solving exercise conducted through cold water, high walls and the occasional ten thousand volts. You finish it with strangers you now know quite well.
The overlap
Finish lines and test reports obey the same rule: you can't talk your way across them.
Service
Five years in the Army Reserve.
Alongside the early years of my career I served five years in the Army Reserve. Basic training came first — and then a run of experiences most day jobs can't offer: live-firing surface-to-air missiles, jungle warfare training in Belize, Central America, and fighting-in-built-up-areas training back home. There was skiing training too, and there was parachute training.
The parachuting stuck. It became my hobby for years afterwards — spent, as every skydiver knows, mostly on the ground drinking tea and watching the sky, because you can't jump when it's windy and you can't jump when it's cloudy. The jumps in between were worth every grounded weekend.
The Reserve taught the same lessons the test floor did, just louder: preparation is everything, kit gets checked twice, and the plan matters right up until the moment you adapt it.
Miles on the passport
Work that travels.
Test engineering has never kept me in one place. Payload investigations took me to India, chasing emissions and susceptibility on waveguide runs a long way from home. Programmes and campaigns have taken me to Germany and France, working alongside teams whose labs run to different rhythms but whose physics, thankfully, is identical. Belize I owe to the Army.
The biggest move was the boldest: relocating to Scotland for the Mangata opportunity — the chance to help design a spacecraft build-and-test facility from a blank sheet of paper. Edinburgh has been home since, through Mangata, Eurofins and now Leonardo. Moving for the work you believe in is its own kind of endurance event, and I'd make the same call again.