It's sad, I know, but here are some brief details about the mind that has created these pages.
I live in the South Yorkshire village of South Anston situated on the A57 between Sheffield and Worksop. I moved here in the Summer of 2000, having married and found work near where my wife was working.
I was born and brought up in the South Wales town of Caerphilly. If you have heard of the place at all it's probably because of the cheese named after the town, or the castle which is apparently the second largest in Europe: second only to Windsor. It is a town which has expanded hugely in the last 20 years in particular and can quite rightly be seen as a dormitory town for Cardiff, 20 minutes away on a good day.
When I started work and left my parents' house I moved a very short distance out of Caerphilly to the small Aber valley and the village of Abertridwr. It was while there that I started this website and began boring the world with my photographs and opinions.
Unfortunately for you, one of my hobbies is photography. I say "unfortunately" because when I signed up to Demon and they gave me five megs of web space I couldn't think of anything to do with it other than showcase a few photographs. I soon realised I didn't have many suitable ones and set out to take some! Things very soon got out of hand and now I've filled a great deal more than five megs with photographs and the explanatory drivel which goes with them. Demon's allocation of web space is now 20 megs... so you can expect more of the same!
My father's ancestors (the Angoves) are, ultimately, from Cornwall, but my mother's side has been in Wales for a bit longer.
As with most people, my circle of friends is constantly changing, and some people I once had daily close contact with I now rarely meet. It probably isn't helped by the fact that I am extremely lazy at writing letters and hate telephoning people. Email is the thing I find easiest, so if you think I may be a long-lost acquaitance of yours, please do get in touch.
I am, of course, Martin Angove. I've been polluting this planet since 1970,, married in 2000, and a father since 2001. It's quite miraculous how quickly we came to this state of affairs - 'going out' in December 1999, engaged in February, married in August, pregnant at Christmas. Sometimes, God's messages have a habit of slapping you in the face eh?
...meanwhile, back in grey reality...
I was born and bred in Caerphilly (see The Miners' Hospital) and lived there more-or-less until the Summer of 2000. You can read about the family on the family page.
I did a BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the Poly in Trefforest (now the University of Glamorgan or, as the sign on the A470 used to say, the 'University of Glam'), finishing in 1992 with a measly 2(ii) (hons) in Electronic Engineering. Before that I was with the first intake (1980/81) to Ysgol Gyfun Cwm Rhymni (if I could access the BBC Wales news archives, I could prove it) and before that I was at Ysgol Ifor Bach, Senghenydd. My interests include my computers (!), photography (as mentioned), music (mostly listening these days, although I used to play Viola, Violin and Piano), reading, hiking, camping and sleeping. I've started doing some D-I-Y recently, but it's more a case of function over form :-)
Until January 1999 I worked as an Engineer at Cardiff Broadcasting Company - more commonly known as Red Dragon and Touch Radio. I started in January 1994 and when I left I had been there exactly five 'working years' which - believe it or not - put me in the top 25% of longest served employees!
I loved the 'job satisfaction' - solving problems in any one of the myriad systems at the station - but the package was derisory: a low salary (barely five figures) with no callout fees (officially on call 50% of the time but actually much more), no mobile telephone allowance (but I had to be within 5 minutes of a telephone at all times), no car allowance (though I had to be within 30 to 45 minutes of the station), and very little appreciation by the management.
When I left I was not replaced, and this may have had a bearing on the fact that six weeks later my boss resigned, leaving in April. His last action in that post was to telephone me and beg me to come back to cover while they found a new engineer. I accepted, but on seriously enhanced terms. I stayed for nearly three months and among other things oversaw the first stage of the loss of local AM radio in this area when Touch Radio gave way to Capital Gold. Now that there is a new guy in the role I have left again. It took them some ten or eleven weeks to find a replacement as by all accounts they only had two or three real applicants. Here's a hint: ILR broadcast engineering is not a good career move any more. (2000 update) The guy who replaced me lasted nine months. Having been in touch with him, I can see why. They had such trouble replacing him, I even briefly covered while still doing my PGCE! The guy who is now looking after Red Dragon in their new premises is apparently averaging three days a week. Rather proves my comment about ILR engineering.
I didn't just leave Dragon because the job was getting me down, I made the difficult decision to switch careers into teaching. That decision took the best part of three years to come to fruition, but in September 1999 I started a Post Graduate Certificate in Education course at Swansea. I toyed for a while with the idea of writing an online account of this year complete with weekly diary and maybe some book reviews, and then I decided to do it. Then things got a bit on top of me and for one reason or another (the 'another' is quite interesting) I 'pulled' the diary. I didn't take a 'proper' computer with me, only my Psion Series 5mx, and all my coursework, lesson plans and nearly all my worksheets were originated on that machine. The 30Mb CF card came in very handy!
Boy was that a gruelling year! It's all over now, and I qualified to teach Junior children in July 2000. I eventually found a job near Sheffield, and had an extremely hard first term followed by an extremely hard just-over-half-a-term at a different school (short term contracts). Again, for one reason or another (and the 'another' is again quite interesting) things changed and I ended up working at Magna Science Adventure Centre (warning, site very heavily dependent on graphics and 'tricks').
Again it was a job I really, really enjoyed doing. It was similar in many ways to the job at Dragon, but minus the pager. It also had a much better idea of an engineer's salary, though I did spend 9 months on a temporary contract before being made permanent. Unfortunately the people in charge of the centre started changing the direction of the business, focussing it more on corporate entertainment rather than the educational and tourist resource it was supposed to be. As part of that, what was at one time a six-man plus manager technical team is now two men, two managers and a "modern apprentice". As a result, it is all that they can do to keep major exhibits working, let alone deal with ongoing building maintenance problems, and as for dreaming about creating new exhibits, suffice to say that not one single new exhibit has been commissioned since opening at Easter 2001. As you might guess, as part of the re-focussing I was one of the technicians "let go" but I'm not about to get into a discussion of why I think they were wrong to do it, or why I didn't fight it.
It's been an incredibly turbulent four years, and I'm sure God put me through all that for a reason, but at the moment, I can't see what it is. We live and learn. I think the next step is a move back to Wales, but until I find employment that's just supposition.
As far as personal traits go... what can I say? I am your stereotypical Welshman who is tenacious, hard working, industrious... but only when properly motivated. Otherwise I am totally lazy. Motivation can take many forms, but for the Welshman it is usually a strong-willed Woman (often Mam). I have always had a surfeit of such Women pushing me, and have now found another :-/. I am also totally in love with Wales.
One thing is (almost) certain though: when we do move we plan to build a house rather than buy one. I am again toying with the idea of putting up an online account of our progress, but I haven't started it yet. I may get around to setting it up soon though, and include our reasoning: why do we want to build rather than buy? Keep an eye open.
Right. That's all for now. If you want more, mail me (address below).