Home at Last

We got to bed really late….just after midnight, after a slight detour via York to Edinburgh. The alarm went off at 6:15am and it was freezing!
 
A quick shave, shower but without the final ‘s’, got dressed, wearing trousers and a shirt and then breakfast. It sounds like a typical, mundane ritual that many people follow but this was a special day. It was the 1st day in nearly 6 years in which I could call Edinburgh home. It was the 1st day of many that I would say ‘bye Sweetie Pea, see you tonight’ to Rosemary after an eternal distance relationship and the 1st day as a lecturer in sports coaching at the University of Stirling.
 
The journey took too long. My timings were chosen ‘just to be on the safe side’. This meant plenty of waiting around. The walk from Bridge of Allan to campus was longer than I remembered too……maybe because when I’d done it before, I had my bike.
 
Barbara in the admin office welcomed me. I immediately liked her, the sort of person that should rule the country! She immediately got me set up in my office! Another 1st, being used to being in a non-stop open plan one. This was scary. I was then given a tour, getting to meet many of my new colleagues. They all seemed quite different to the motley crew that I was used to.
 
Back to my office to get on with some online induction modules…… Health and Safety, Data Security and the like. It was weird being in silence. It dawned on me that going from being the ‘academic and intellectual one’ I was down at the bottom of the tree again. Most of my colleagues had Ph.D’s and were experienced researchers. Although I have the former, I am now starting afresh in a new area of research using different methods.  Gulp!
 
I thought back to my Ph.D. viva when Prof. Passfield had asked me why I deserved to be awarded it. Tough question as much of it had been an unparalleled disaster.  “I have become an expert in coffee and the methods of brewing it very quickly” I said. My supervisor’s face was one of horror.
 
“I bought the most basic but challenging expresso machine, a La Pavoni lever machine which requires absolute precision in process to extract a good coffee, I understand how environmental factors affect the extraction, what physics are involved in the machine, what the ideal growing environment is for the bean etc etc…… and I learnt this in a few months. I have learnt how to learn and the importance of process. Some of my research may be flawed but I acknowledge where I went wrong. I was most certainly a doctor philosophiae”.
 
There were a few nods in the room and that was that. I was now smiling. I was at the beginning of a new journey but with a much wiser mind than when I started my 1st academic one. There will be mountains to climb and freezing streams to cross. There is a certain degree of fear and trepidation too but there is also confidence that I’m up to the job.
 
It was a far quieter day than expected. I was taken for lunch by Justine, my new colleague who I’ll be working most closely with and did a bit of ‘getting to grips’ with the IT system. The architect who designed the building may have been quite a creative, but his end result was a concrete and breezeblock maze! I got lost several times in the day.
The train journey was spent thinking about how I could dress like a University Challenge contestant. Exiting Waverley Station, I looked up at the Balmoral Hotel, previously known as The North British. My granny had worked there for may years. It hit me….I was home!