This Sentence No Verb Rich Cochrane's Blog

This is the personal blog of Rich Cochrane, who co-organises Big Ideas. This page is a stab at explaining how he got to be doing whatever he was doing on the day you met him.

I did a BA in English Literature at Cardiff University, focussing mainly on pre-twentieth-century poetry and critical theory. My undergraduate dissertation was on Lyotard. I received a British Academy award to stay at Cardiff and write a PhD on the aesthetics on music. I moved to London and, finding work for aestheticians rather thin on the ground, ended up spending a couple of years doing part-time work and writing.

During this time I wrote Poetry (the horrible subtitle was not my doing), which is a book about poetry, not a book of poetry. I also wrote a book about website design, which is now out of print and well out of date. I wrote journalistic pieces — reviews, interviews and some sleeve notes — about the avant garde music scene in London. I went to a lot of gigs in tiny rooms in pubs in sketchy parts of town and ran a web site called Musings. (It was a Geocities site and so should have been deleted in mid-2009, though at the time of writing this it’s still there). I even did the odd turn as a performer.

Meanwhile the dot-com boom was happening, and people I knew started making good money programming computers. Growing up as a bit of a geek in the ’80s, this was something I could sort of do, and I’d been doing a bit in my day-job just to make it more interesting. I ended up joining a company that consisted of four guys working in the director’s spare bedroom. After about four years I moved to Goldman Sachs where I stayed another six years building systems for a derivatives trading floor. I learned some things about finance and computer science. I did a BSc in maths at the Open University. I learned to play the clarinet a bit.

In February 2007 Nathan Charlton and I set up Big Ideas, which has become a successful, free monthly event. You can read about some of the motivation behind the events in the manifesto we published at the time (it appeared in the newsletter of Sapere). The events continue and our activities are beginning to branch out into other areas.

I left Goldman in 2009 to undertake a PGCE in Post-Compulsory Education at the Institute of Education with a specialism of mathematics. Following this I’ve been a freelance private tutor; you can find out more about what and how I teach here.

In case you’re easily confused, nothing on this blog has any connection with my employers, past or present. This is what “personal blog” means.