Neil has always enjoyed sharing his scientific experiments.  At the tender age of ten, Neil and his friend Chris would lob paper bags full of water onto the dry and unsuspecting heads of the inhabitants of Warwick.  Passers by seeing bag of water exploding on the pavement in front of them might look up, but the culprits were well hidden by the parapet of the Georgian houses.  Chris now works for the United Nations, perhaps trying to make amends for his misspent youth.

Neil has always enjoyed making things.  At Coten End Junior School he made a steam powered fairground from thousands of tiny Meccano parts.  He has never been without a Meccano set since.  At secondary school, Bablake in Coventry, he assisted in the construction of the first of a lifelong series of hovercraft.  He also made a gas chromatograph, a sophisticated laboratory instrument for analyzing gases.  For this, he needed a large cylinder of hydrogen gas.  Health and Safety risk assessments had not yet been invented !  For pocket money, he mended old-fashioned valve TV sets, and played the church organ.

Neil worked at the British Gas Research Unit in Solihull, where he made his first electronic flow controller (40 years later he is still working on electronic flow controls !), and investigated the mystery of the exploding gas boilers using high speed UV chart recorders.  (The mystery was a printed circuit board fault.)

Neil then went on to Merton College Oxford with a scholarship.  Whilst there he started his long term addition to collecting books; he was in a good position to pick up bargains as organiser of the college book mart.  He now has a collection of 4000 books.  He went on to work in Hamburg, where as well as playing accordion for the Scottish dance club he also helped to discover the gluon, the sub-atomic particle which glues the quarks together.

After discovering that bags of water always obey gravity, Neil started to experiment with making things that defy gravity.  Model aircraft of many designs were built at home - always with a name and address label to make them easier to reclaim later from the police lost property office.  One example was an autogyro that flew well until the day that it did a spot of mid-air redesign and chopped off all its own rotors.  Another was a mini hot air balloon for teddy bears, made out of plastic bags and filled with hot air from a fan heater, which went to 'show and tell' at his daughters' junior school. 

Then there were projectiles, at first reproductions of ancient technologies: a home-made trebuchet catapult with a 4 meter arm, and a springald.  More unusual were the vacuum bazooka, the new improved rapid fire vacuum bazooka, the carrot cannon, and the armour-piercing carrot cannon, which uses air pressure from a plastic soda bottle as its motive force. 

Neil has always been fascinated by fireworks, possibly since his infancy in Malta, where fireworks are a constant feature of celebrations, even during the day.  As a youth he made his own, once devastating a lawn when the injudicious use of fan heater set light to the almost dry chlorate paper.  More recently he has patented an oxygen firework system.  This is capable of spectacular fountain effects, but is safe, because it stops as soon as you stop the oxygen flowing.