3 December 1999
Again, the JIF announcement is delayed. Feels like a previous incarnation in which I wrote the thing. But while it remains undecided we have planning blight, and can do nothing but await being reeled in by the competition on all fronts. The temptation of the Continental Adventure grows by degrees.

6 December 1999
Today’s the day. Nothing arrives. We learn interesting new aspects of the internal post system. Letters can be lost for days apparently.

7 December 1999
The Letter arrives while we’re at coffee. The secretaries bring it along in a gaggle, and then retire to a safe distance. Nondescript envelope and a big day, but I’ve been training myself to expect a ‘No’ and I’m pretty flat. I open it slowly and peer in, looking for whether it is ‘regret’ or ‘pleased’. It is in fact ‘pleased’, and I am in fact surprised. Short pause for effect for the assembled troops. Involuntary smile – fascinating for a psychologist – as I read it out. Everyone else is expecting to be kicked into touch also, so celebrations are strangely muted. Happily though, the Foodies have booked us into 21 Queen Street for lunch. The mood rises as the lobster thermidor and Chateau Musar descend. Considerably the worse by close of business, but my car-share partner didn’t get his JIF, so there’s rather little triumphalism on the way back home.

9 December 1999
Negligible coverage in the papers. Lacks human interest, I suppose. We’ve done a bit better in the frozen north by emphasising the human and unusual 30-something, half-female, and more-discovery-journal-output-than-most-universities aspects. But disappointing, nonetheless.

10 December 1999
Talk in Zurich. On the way there, I lose track somewhere in the university, and enquire the way. "Professor oder Assistant?," he asks. Presumably, if I were the latter I would have had to take my chances. The talk is a bit under-rehearsed, but the medium is drawn along by the message, and we all seem to agree on the new way of thinking about the relation between connectivity and information dynamics. Hire a Passat to relay relocation decision in person. The autobahn and joie de vivre conspire to push things along at 200kph. Mercedes drivers, I notice, don’t like being passed by a mere VW. My would-be colleague is not greatly pleased, but recognises that DM30 million rather changes things, being a shed-load in anyone’s currency.

11 January 2000
Meetings with the Architects and the special projects managers are now twice weekly, interspersed with multitudinous QAA meetings. Personal science is now a distant dream, although the labs are going brilliantly well, and so this hiatus shouldn’t be visible. Room data sheets are circulating, and plans are becoming steadily more refined, while stimulating mild squabbling among the PIs.

9 February 2000
A meeting with the University Procurement Office people. They wear the hunted look of traffic wardens expecting trouble. But I am too busy to make any, and they seem anyway to be totally inside the process of tendering and such. I’m grateful to be able to hand over the whole process. No-one has ever been so nice to them, and they are naturally unsettled.

14 February 2000
QAA and nothing but.

18 February 2000
24! So it was all worthwhile. Perhaps.

2 March 2000
A first but serious difference of opinion with the Architects. Our dream of an airy, glassy, humanising structure, in which we will like to work, and through which passers-by will be able to see that we are not mad scientists but people, appears to have receded. We are now to be coated by a white translucent substance. The Reichstag in its wrapping; Patrick McGoohan trapped inside the white-rover-thing from The Prisoner: suffocating. Local firms of solicitors are worried about being overlooked from across the road. Strangely, residents all around the world are quite used to the idea that buildings opposite might have windows. It is resolved that the Architects will show us the merits of the proposed material on site.

7 March 2000
Heathrow, Abingdon and Dublin and back, in a whistle-stop tour of leisure centres and office parks. The material is transparently [sic] unsuitable for a prestigious building. It would look like a Cleethorpes caravan. But we explore the issues very thoroughly and are temporarily arrested by security staff while taking too close an interest in a curtain walling system near Heathrow. The Architects are finally dissuaded in the VIP lounge on the way out of Dublin.

27 March 2000
My friends in Procurement and I are to be visited by the Trust’s procurement expert, the rightly celebrated Wellcome Biker Lady, though sadly not this time bestride her Ducati. The virtue of doing it by the book becomes evident, and we appear to have satisfactory answers to all her perspicacious questions. However, it seems that I must go directly to jail when the VAT man disputes whether all the computers should really have been zero-rated.

4 April 2000
Have foolishly agreed to give a talk at a JIF do at the DTI. Have even more foolishly suffered an attack of multimedia megalomania. Cross fingers that the computer doesn’t fall over embarrassingly. We show up early to give the machine a head start. As the place fills up, it becomes evident that we are enfants terribles among rather many eminences grises. They think we’re the caterers, or research assistants. Astonishingly, the machine does not fall over, and afterward everyone, even a noted supermarketeer, is very kind.

11 April 2000
A wonderful windfall! There has been widespread satisfaction that we are planting our building on top of the Dean’s reserved parking space. But close inspection of our planning permission reveals that the new parking area formed alongside us may only be used in connection with our building. Happy day! Retribution! However, no doubt something will be worked out on the golf course, and we will be returned to our rightful place.

See also

• The space age: Article on the diary of JIF awardee, Malcolm Young, Part 2

External links

• Department of Psychology at the University of Newcastle: Research interests