Working in a lab may be a boring career for some that are adapted for outdoor pursuits, but this is my life and my choice. I was never the social star of my peers yet I was never an outcast or someone targeted as an object to make fun of, well no more than anyone else who succeeds in higher education. The thing is that it's all happened so quickly and my life seems over before it has begun. My name is Simon Bailey and I had expectations like everybody else. Perhaps I thought life was mapped out for me and that one day something would just click and that would be me, content. But it didn't happen like that or at least it hasn't yet.
At least I know that being thirty-six years old I don't really have to start worrying about retiring, as I do like my newly appointed work.
Jeff Dunham
English: Buttered walnut and raisin bread
Illustration showing the interior of a cathode-ray...It isn't the specific aspect of my work that appeals to me, it is the nature of it and the reactions I obtain when questioned on it. I have a minuscule lab but have no shortage of equipment necessary to research the fact that bread will tend to land on the side on which it has been layered with butter or spread. I have been studying this and related areas for roughly five years and have acquired much knowledge and detached myself from many friends. Since I left Sheffield University in 1989 I have had no qualms about a lack of socialising, as an old friend and a successful one at that funds my work. I owe him a great deal.
His name is Jeff Baxter and I have known him since our schooling debuts at nursery, all those years ago in Ashton-Underline, Manchester. This was a particularly...