This is necessarily a pretty short section. I can balance on a bicycle and cycle up most Cornish hills (examples on the right) without dismounting. Believe me, at my age that feels like a skill.

I also practise Zen in the art of bicycle maintenance, experiencing the occasional satori when unexpectedly alerted to the fact that I forgot to tighten the bolts that secure the brake cables. Once I even managed to connect the brakes the wrong way round, which brought me close to nirvana.

Apart from that, I can put this HTML stuff together with a measure of competence (you might disagree), though extremely slowly. I can fiddle around a bit with JavaScript and Java (see my utterly fascinating Mastermind, Hangman and Central Heating applets)as well, but, if the code has crashed your browser, you won't be any too impressed by that 'skill', which is roughly on a par with my cycle maintenance skills. On the other hand, you won't be reading this claim either. I have also fiddled reasonably successfully with Visual Basic, blahdeblah....

I use Photoshop (but, as you may have already gathered, remain design-blind), as well as Director and Flash (some rather lame examples on the 'acknowledgements' page), 3D Studio MAX, and, of course, Microsoft Office (doesn't everybody?). I know it's cool, even obligatory, to say you can code in Java. Well, I do and it makes my head hurt. As a general principle, I don't think things that make my head hurt are a good idea. And languages that are as slow as Visual Basic and as difficult as C seem simply perverse. But it's a living.

I used to be able to speak French and German fluently, and Spanish moderately well (at least I thought so; maybe the Spaniards I talked to were just very polite). Of course, if you're going to do cultural studies with any credibility, you've actually got to be French. The next best thing, of course, is to be incomprehensible in English (teaching Java provides plenty of practice), but if you can be incomprehensible in French, you're guaranteed life tenure. So I read Baudrillard in the original and try not to let on that I think he seems even loopier than in translation. I doubt that I speak these languages at all well now, but a consolation of that is that it becomes easier to speak French incomprehensibly, so somebody must offer me a chair of cultural studies soon. I do watch movies in French and German whenever I have the opportunity. I listen to French radio most mornings. It's refreshing to hear a whole nation talking about what to Anglo-Saxons seem like antiquated notions, such as 'social justice', 'redistribution of wealth', 'egalitarianism', even (horrors!) 'socialism' and (whisper it) 'communism'.

So, overall, not terribly accomplished at anything, but, after a lifetime's experience as a teacher, I wear the teacher's new clothes reasonably convincingly, I hope.