Keele

You have your own business called Ergoscape.

You're a secondee at Keele, which I'm really keen to explore, on knowledge mobilisation, which is interesting.

Yes, yes.

But where should we start? Let's start with Human Factors, shall we? Because that feels very apt given that that's meant to be what we talk about on most of our podcasts in a weird and wonderful way.

Yeah.

So you're currently and I'm really intrigued by this.

So you're currently a fellow at Keele University and your knowledge mobilization.

Talk to me about what knowledge mobilization with and how that how that relates to human factors.

When you think each one of them carries 40, 50 people each time, the figures are astronomical.

And I've been to the memorial in Keele to the U-Boats and it's just wall after wall of names, U-Boat names, U-Boat names.

It's really eye-opening considering...

You know, these people went to sea in horrible conditions.

Now we're getting more contemporary.

Yeah, I listened to that this morning, and I remember hearing it in my car radio outside Keele service station 'cause I was driving up and down from Chester to London, and I have that, you know, you have that pinpoint memory-

[laughs]

... of a certain moment with a song, and that's my memory.

Keele service station, and I remember liking it for about half a minute, and then I realized it was just, "I wanna get on my motorbike and kind of be with you, girl", and all this kind of crap.

It's awful.

[laughs]

Yeah.

And you went to Keele?

Keele, yeah.

Good- This guy's done his research.

Yeah, I do try.

Yeah.

So what was Keele like for music? 'Cause I mean, that's basically Stoke, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, I went to

University of Keele, which I have to say, that's the turning point intellectually, because up to that point, I've nothing against Highgate School, may I say, but Keele was a vista.

Having got there, I was amazed at what they were doing, because they said to everybody in the first year, the four years, not three, first year, forget what you came here to do.

We want to give you a shop window.

And I sat, I was mesmerised all the way through.

One subject that wasn't there was law, because they didn't have a law department.

So you didn't do law at Keele at all? No, I did another subject I'd never even heard of.

taught by a very, very well-known professor of philosophy at the time called, well, he used his initials, A.G.N. Flew.

Maybe we couldn't afford them.

But I would quite like to move on, looking at the time, to when I went up to university at Keele as a young lad of 17.

And the food scene in the North, in the frozen North, which was actually absolutely completely different from the stuff we used to get down here, the said tinned beef burgers.

So in Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent was the closest club, Port Vale was pretty near, Burton wasn't that far.