What do you do for a living?
We produce a magazine that looks at defence against chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high yield explosive weapons (CBRNE).
They all sound dramatic, but once you realise that they include poisoning and highly infectious communicable diseases, you realise that they happen all the time. Everything from toxic narcotics like fentanyl through to whatever pathogen the Congo or SE Asia has been incubating, are within our scope.
That magazine comes out six times a year, and goes out worldwide. We also do two conferences on the same topic, one in the US and one in Poland – they are the largest events for first responders in those countries.
Then finally, when we have a little slack, we do some consultancy. The magazine is the heart of it all.
What does this mean day-to-day?
We read a lot of news from around the world, many of these stories are publicly available, but you need to search for them. Academic papers take up time too… but nothing meets sitting down with a someone and finding out the reality over a beer.
What do you love about magazines?
Reading print is eidetic, we remember so many more things about it than we do on a tablet, phone or screen.
Each magazine is a little time machine to where you were when you read it, whether there was a creepy guy opposite, the hardness of the seat, or whether the air was hot and smelled…
All of that is contained in the memory of that magazine – and each one is different to each person.
Tell us one thing not many people know about you?
My parents called me Robert Gwyn Winfield, but no-one but the dentist calls me Robert (I don’t correct dentists as I don’t like them) – my parents have always called me Gwyn.
I asked my mother why she named me Robert, but called me Gwyn, and she said, ‘If you wanted to change your name, you wouldn’t need to explain it to anyone.’ What life of crime my mother was preparing me for, I am not entirely sure.