Bruce Roberts

Born Robert Bruce within sight of the rolling sea and Barry Island roller coasters in South Wales, exactly 2 years before JK Rowling and 17 years to the day before Harry Potter.

Adopted at age 5, by the Roberts family and when asked, if he wanted to keep his first name, he somewhat creatively asked (age 5 remember) if he could swap his name round and be called Bruce, which came to pass- obviously, or else this would be a really bad pseudonym!

Education went from St Nicholas Infants School, just West of Cardiff, Ernehale Infant and Juniors in Nottingham, followed by Arnold Hill Comprehensive then Trent Polytechnic.

He experienced 28 years employed in BT and Accenture, then 12 years working for software companies; Atlantic Link and Assima, he became self-employed developing e-Learning material.

The COVID crisis of 2020 had an impact on opportunities, but the real headache as they say was being struck down at the beginning of 2021 with double brain haemorrhages. Low fluid pressure in his spine had caused his brain to sag in his skull causing him to act even more unusual than his friends and family have been used to over his lifetime. An emergency visit became an extended period, Full Board at the Queens Medical Centre Nottingham.

Bruce’s release from hospital came with two weeks having to lay flat whilst taking the prescribed treatment plan, which genuinely and seemingly surprising, was to drink 12 cups of coffee a day.

During this period and only managing to put up with about 2 hours of afternoon TV, featuring Desperate Antique Bargain Hunting Lawyered-up Housewives, reconditioning old cars and aircraft in deprived areas of London and Manchester, with a quick break viewing border security antipodean style, he realised that things had to change.

Bruce’s mind wandered to a place that Albert Einstein described as ‘… a new, stubbornly persistent illusion.’ It seemed that a world that he had toyed with at EMCON, 3 years earlier, Nottingham’s rather excellent answer to Comic-Con but without the cost of international travel, might be a world to revisit.

Mumbled notes dictated into an iPhone, whilst laying recumbent, overdosing on caffeine, became A4 pages being torn out of writing pads, piling up to a point that when recovery began, so did the typing, if only to stop the house looking like a future afternoon TV location for a documentary about waste hoarders.

As they also say, ‘the rest is history’. Although with all good time travel yarns, if the future is history and the past is in the future, the present must be the gift which every morning now turns out to be.

Bruce is sadly widowed, but has two loving daughters,and (three – insert new number here) grandchildren - one of whom will invent time travel in the year 2189.