Welcome to my Home Page!

Congratulations!
You seem to have succeeded in tracking me down despite the internet's best efforts to make this difficult, therefore I hope you are now able to find something interesing here to have a nose at. Explore, if you will, the links on the left which point to pages I have written studying various subjects which are of interest to me, but which are in most cases poorly supported on the web. I have also included a few links at the bottom to external sites with subject matter which I have found to be of interest or amusing.

Perhaps now though, I should introduce myself:

I'm a grandad!
This is Scarlett, 18 months

The more astute amongst you may have already noticed that my name is Andrew Westcott, although amongst my friends I get called Andy, along with a few less printable names. I was born in 1962 and was fortunate enough to have been brought up on a farm in the village of Doddiscombesleigh which itself is located within the Teign Valley, Devon, in the South-West of England. This gave me almost unlimited scope for childhood exploration, with the vast woodlands, steep sided valleys and many disused quarries and mine workings in the area.

Unfortunately, the untimely death of my father made it necessary for us to sell the farm and move to the nearby city of Exeter where my mother still lives, although I married a local wench from Bridford and susequently moved on again to set up house in a village in East Devon, where I now live with four of my five children but without her. The fifth child has moved out and spawned my first granchild - Scarlett, pictured above.

Work-wise, I am currently engaged in a workshop situated within the warehouse of an agricultural distributor where I make and assemble various argicultural components, mainly bespoke PTO shafts and hydraulic hoses, along with anything else too difficult or greasy for the poor sods elsewhere in the warehouse to manage.

I have loads of interests and hobbies, some of them perhaps a little eccentric and a few just plain weird. For example, I enjoy photography, am interested in astronomy, geology, palaeontology, meteorology, I like messing with electronics, I'm a licensed radio amateur... in fact just about anything scientific interests me, whether it be chemistry, biology or physics - I consider myself to be an unofficial 'student of all the sciences', to quote Doc from 'Back To The Future'. That doesn't mean I know anything about those subjects, just that I'm interested in them.

As I've already said, photography is one of my interests despite my hair-wrenching ineptitude at it, so you'll find that a lot of images have been used throughout the various pages - in most cases the pictures and captions can be clicked on to load a higher resolution version of the picture, if you happen to wish to see one.

If for some strange reason any of the images appeal to you I don't mind you nicking them if it is for personal, non-website use. Not that I could stop you anyway, they're on the internet! If you want a higher resolution version of any image on this site to print out or to do whatever with, just e-mail me your request and we can discuss the technicalities of transferring the file - but do read the following paragraphs which mention the thorny subject of copyright.

Please note:
All photography and text is my own work unless otherwise stated, and is therefore subject to copyright.
 
I'm happy for my photographs to be used in non-commercial web sites as long as an HTML link is provided to whichever of my pages contains the photograph and clear credit for the image is given.
 
Use of my photographs for commercial purposes, either in the form of a web page or a printed publication is expressly prohibited unless I have granted you full permission, and any terms associated with that permission have been adhered to.