User:Kudpung/UP Hello

Kudpung is the name of a village in Isan, Northeastern Thailand. It is also the main home of this 1940s vintage Wikipedian from Malvern, England where my father (97, †2016), an aeronautics and defense systems scientist, helped develop Radar during WWII. I was educated in a traditional English boys' boarding school (ugh! which could have been Buckeridge's model for Linbury Court) where I scived a lot of the time to build radio controlled model aircraft; my favourite subjects were Bach, the Boys Own Paper, Paris Match, Punch, Baudelaire, Molière, Shakespeare, and Émile Zola. After a failed attempt at Lettres in Nanterre University in 1968 (May, of course!), I took a first degree in Business Studies in the UK,  after which I spent six years in Lower Saxony with BAOR (huh?), followed by a move to what was then West Berlin where I spent nine years studying a mix of linguistics, pedagogics, and media, and wrote some awful plays and an even worse rock opera, touring Europe as a drummer with jazz fusion bands. In 1988 following several years of involvement every summer with the Avignon Festival, I moved permanently to the Provence where I taught linguistics in a regional university, and developed marketing solutions for Rhône wines. In 2000 I settled in Thailand where I taught in a public university, and designed teacher training programmes. I retired in 2008 to my farm in Isan where I occupy my time with writing, composing, and running a small consultancy. From 1999 to 2012 I was French-German-English lexicographer for an international publisher of bilingual dictionaries and authored one of the first comprehensive English-German and German-French electronic dictionaries for the Mac platform. In Thailand I wrote a complete set of EFL texbooks for Grades 1 through 12, published in 2006. I return to Malvern regularly. My daughter is director of a research faculty for robotics in a French university, and I have three super grandchildren.