At 50: near death, life and technology

Today, I turn 50.

During my life, there have been two occasions when I have been very close to death. As a two-year-old, I was diagnosed with and treated for a cancer that, just a year earlier, had no cure.

Twenty years later, I nearly died a second time.

I’ve always been obsessed with technology and the minutiae of how things work. I grew up at the tail end of the Acid House era of illegal orbital raves, so-called because they were held near the M25, the large arterial road that coils around London.

Several pirate radio stations disseminated the cryptic details of these parties and their locations. I became infatuated with how these broadcast operations worked, the FM radio technology they used, and how they stayed one step ahead of the law.

Fast forward a few years, and I was deeply involved in running just such a pirate station in Nottingham. We played a continual cat-and-mouse game with the Radio Investigation Service, part of the Government’s Department of Trade and Industry, later Ofcom. Their job was to track our transmissions, and our job was to make it as hard as possible for them to find us (good-quality FM transmitters are very expensive).

At the time, our transmission site was atop a five-storey warehouse, nestled at the summit of a tall hill overlooking Nottingham. We paid the owner to look the other way and profess ignorance if the authorities paid a visit.

Another precaution was that after each weekend’s broadcasts (we eventually went 24/7), we would remove the transmission mast and hide it behind a short section of steeply pitched roof. To remove or remount it, we usually straddled the roof ridge and scooted along on our bottoms like riding a horse. When returning with the aerial, I usually entertained myself by imagining myself as a medieval knight jousting for the hand of a beautiful, voluptuous maiden.

There was a small roster of trusted individuals who did this mundane but essential job every weekend. And so it went on for many months. W…