Hasn’t it been a while since I last posted?! Naughty me! In the last month I have moved 200-odd miles across the UK and re-settled in Plymouth, which, for those foreign readers who may not know, is an old naval town on the south coast which was bombed the fuck out of in WW2 and took a long while to recover. As such, it’s much like my last home (Coventry), which shares that same bombed-and-rebuilt-unsympathetically.
I’m very lucky here - I found a beautiful house in a Georgian (1830s) square - pretty much the only one left in the city. There was another lovely square, until WW2 - Portland Square - and only one house was left of it by the end of the war. That was demolished a few years ago now and the University build a new office building upon it, called Portland Square too. I like that, for some reason. My office is in Portland Square which is Lecture Theatres and an art gallery on the ground floor and then administrative and academic offices for 5 floors above, each one winding around three atria. My office overlooks the B atrium and I can see outdoors if I stand by the window. It’s one of those silly modern buildings where the power and network sockets are in the middle of the floor and the window opens with a switch. It’s smaller than my office at Warwick but I like it very much and as I fill it with EVER MORE BOOKS, it will gain character! Out of the window, I can see the University’s old Planetarium, which is now an immersion cinema-type space, the Fitzroy Building and the Mary Newman Hall of Residence. The Fitzroy building was named for Admiral FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle and Mary Newman for the wife of Sir Francis Drake. Marine-related history immerses this city (excuse the pun) and it’s very nice to work somewhere where the buildings are named after people I’ve actually heard of. The first University I studied at was King’s College, University of London, which has an amazing history. When I started there, it was “Found in 1829”, but then they realised that since merging with the old United Medical and Dental School, they had origins right back to around 950AD, so dropped the tagline. I then moved to Warwick, which has very little history, being only 47 at present -though it never did much to add any, with the newer buildings having imaginative names like “Social Sciences” and “Bluebell Views” Hall Of Residence. I always felt they should go back to their original scheme of naming after people (Rootes, Butterworth…) who had made significant contributions to the founding of the University and its early years. Oddly, I joined Warwick in time for the 40th anniversary and Plymouth for the 150th anniversary, which is quite nice. I’ve even got a “150 Years With Plymouth University” graphic on the screen of my swinky swanky office telephone. Cute huh?
My laboratory space is, unusually for me, not in the same building, but a few metres away in the (Sir Humphrey) Davy Building, named for he of the mining lamp that revolutionised the industry. Appropriate for the son of the son of the son of a miner who, rather than coal or ironstone, mines genomes and metals (using Bacteria instead of dynamite and a pick), really!
I’m still in a bit of a tizz getting myself settled both at work and at home and writing grants and spending my start-up package to furnish my lab but the glassblowing designs have all been sent off, my first official Plymouth procurements came today (a GammaScout radiation detector and a colour printer for my office) and my new business cards should arrive tomorrow. It’s all gradually falling into place.
