I live in the UK and work as a Solutions Architect for CGI, specialising in the automated testing of Critical National Infrastructure (systems that cannot fail).

I have good war stories to tell.

I was a highly-prized systems engineer before discovering that writing automated tests appeals to my maverick, when done properly.

Family history plays a part: my great-grandfather Elijah Webb was Design Safety Officer for the White Star Line. His recommendation was overlooked when the decision was made on the number of lifeboats needed for their luxury flagship. She was, after all, designed to be unsinkable.

Family lore has it that he took to the drink when the first telegrams reached Harland & Wolff in Belfast. The RMS Titanic had sunk with the loss of 1,500 souls.

Following in his footsteps, my grandfather, my father, and I spent our working lives stress-testing hasty design decisions. I am a fourth-generation doomsayer. It runs in the family.

I grew up on my grandmother Eleanora O’Brien’s knee. She was an explorer, a traveller, a tireless campaigner for women’s rights. Perhaps she passed on her restless gene? I grew up wanting to rove over exotic lands and distant shores too.

This website collects some of our travels together and finally throws some light on her oral history of the family. In some ways my own story begins with my favourite book from her, the Three Jolly Fishermen, which starts like this:

She gave it to me when I was four years old and sick with measles, an unpleasant time. I am reminded of it periodically, because my father C James Webb had a second career as medical photographer, and his photographs of sick people and diseases sold well. I still find photographs of my childhood illnesses in unusual places. Fortunately they were published before the rise of social media and search engines. He was the Head of the Audio Visual Aids department at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine just off Gower Street in Bloomsbury. He was uniquely good at taking photographs of medical diseases, both microscopy and field work.

When I was stung by a bee, he reached for his camera.

My measles and other mishaps appeared in over a hundred medical periodicals and magazines. The transparencies he licensed from his photo library made good money, especially in Doctors Answers, a popular magazine that built up week by week into a comprehensive encyclopedia for worried parents (and hypochondriacs).

During the week, his small team at the LSHTM provided audio and visual assistance for lecturers and students. As a child, I often helped in his darkroom, developing film and enlarging negatives. The School had an unusual diversity of talent; down the corridor from his lab was a glassblower’s workshop, making retorts and other specialised equipment. Further on was a large padlocked chest freezer o which I used to sit and dangle my legs when my father had official visitors.

That chest freezer was one of only two in the UK containing the live smallpox virus. Eventually it was moved to greater safety.

We will circle back to the basement of the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine later.

I’m lucky to work a four-day week. I have time to work on side projects!

I want to improve our self-build camper van, lilleflyttehytta, which carries a portable shrine to their memory.

I dream to learn how to handle our pocket yacht Paloma properly, now moored at Southampton, and Hullabaloo, our cruising dinghy.

I learnt how to sail a dinghy as a child and always considered the next step to be too expensive and maintenance-intensive, but I’ve come to appreciate that sailing and living on a small yacht is feasible if done within the right parameters - Stewart Brand is busy writing his book The Maintenance Race and on reading it I decided that I wanted to sail just a bit like another long-time hero of mine, Bernard Moitessier, although I’ll never be as confident or competent a sailor as he was.