The Ned Wood Archive

In my life I’ve never stopped
to worry about a thing

Just realised I haven’t really told you what I’m doing up here. Not much to tell, really. I’m in Edinburgh because I want to stay a student forever. I had so much fun doing my first degree that I want to do it again. Of course, it never works out like that. It’s never the same.

The department is in a big anonymous building in a big anonymous campus on the edge of town. The university has segregated the interesting people: artists, writers, philosophers, and such and put them in the centre of the city and moved the boring folk: the scientists, the engineers, out to a cold grey tundra landscape under the Braids.

I’m doing research up here. When you do research, you have a supervisor. However, you never see your supervisor for the entire duration of your research. It’s like when you’ve got a fading star in the last series of a popular TV show. They decide they aren’t going to pay the star enough, so they all but write them out of the script. The actor turns up in the last scene or so just so that you know it is still the same show and so they can advertise this actor’s presence. Same with a PhD. Your supervisor turns up in the last scene and you remember that this is a PhD. So you have to put up with “colleagues” instead. These are the guys who tell you what to do, how to do it, that sort of stuff. Some are helpful. Some not so much.

I share a room with a “colleague” called John Pike. White walls, two desks, windows out onto fields, south facing windows, but too small to create any sort of a view or to let much sun in and brighten the place up, and John Pike. Pike’s that bloke I told you about when we went up to Hunter’s Bog to do the seismic refraction. He’s a final year PhD. Just finishing his thesis. He lets me know this is his room with his rules and I’m lucky to have a desk in the corner. He gives me a “you sit over here and don’t disturb me” vibe.

I could have called him Mordred or Darth Vader or Oswald Mosley and you’d know instantly what sort of bloke he was. He was ugly, which is another way you can tell. And don’t get me started on that “don’t be superficial” argument. Yes, sometimes you can judge books by their covers. But in this case he was ugly from the inside out. His personality informed his presence. He was arrogant. He was rude. He was bigoted. He hadn’t got a good word to say about anything or anyone, apart from himself. He hated Scotland and the Scottish. I wondered why he’d come up here. Then I realised he’d be the same about wherever he was and whoever he was with. Hated everyone. To paraphrase P.G Wodehouse: it is never difficult to distinguish between a Pike with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. Yet, he assumed that you’d do what he wanted without his having to try persuasion or charm or any of those other skills one normally needs to win friends or influence people. And he smoked the most evil smelling cigarettes. If fingernails scratching a blackboard had a smell, they’d smell like those cigarettes. He blows smoke in my face which is another thing that gets us off on the wrong foot.

“Do you mind?”

“How about I only smoke in my half of the room?”

“Well, that won’t work, will it!”

He’d ceremoniously placed his own desk in the centre of the room, facing the door, so that he could vet everyone that came in. I hate it when that happens. You know right away that you are going to have to cause a scene because if you don’t you’ll be playing catch up forever. And I hate causing scenes. But I had to, so I steeled myself. I noticed that there was a marker pen next to a whiteboard on one of the walls, so I grabbed it and then walked around the room making a show of weighing up the lay of the land. The door was almost in one corner. The wall with the small windows was opposite the door. Pike’s desk faced away from them showing that he also considered them too small to look out of. I stood at the door and looked at the corner diagonally opposite. Pike’s desk was the only piece of furniture that prevented me drawing a straight line from the door to that corner so I walked over to it, gave it a hefty shove, which took him enough by surprise that he didn’t immediately push it back. Then I marked a line diagonally across the floor from the far corner to the door. The room was divided in half, near enough. On the window side was Pike, Pike’s desk, Pike’s books and the rest of Pike’s junk. On the other side was my little desk and loads more junk. Not my junk, mind. However it was a start.

“My side. Your side” I said.

The best he could manage in reply was to push some more junk that maybe wasn’t his after all over to my side and blow more smoke, which was his smoke, over to my side. He thought that counted as enough of a victory, so he said “Fair enough” as he did so implying that the game was over for the day.

But of course you have to keep the pressure up, otherwise you’ll gradually slip behind. I’d go into the room and find that his desk had moved over the line. I had to decide exactly how far I was going to go with stuff. Any movement of the desk over the line was immediately rebuffed. So he tried putting his desk right on the line and pushing sheets of papers and folders as far as they would go to the edge of his desk, hanging over the line, but not falling off. I thought that was too petty, so I let that one go. They generally fell off anyway as he always pushed them too far. It was hard work, but just like training a dog, he eventually understood where the boundaries were and started, more or less, to respect them. And, funnily enough, his smoking decreased as his respect for the diagonal line increased.

Anyway, he shows up less and less as term goes by. And I can spend time in the library or the lab, so we only have this discussion, the same discussion, about once a week. But I know when he’s been in. His roll ups, horrible smelly things, linger long after he’s gone.

The other thing I remember him for is introducing me to the joke. I’m not sure whether it is a joke or not, more of a catch phrase that seems to follow me around. Anyway, he thinks it’s funny because he repeats it every time I see him. The first time we met, we’d introduced ourselves.

“Hello, I’m John Pike.”

“Hi, my name’s Ned Wood.”

“Ned? I’d rather be a Numpty than a Ned. Ha Ha Ha!”

It went over my head, so he repeated it.

“I’d rather be a Numpty than a Ned. You’re Ned. I wouldn’t want to be a Ned. I’d rather be a Numpty. Ha Ha HA.”

Apparently it’s a quote from somewhere. Don’t know where. But it seems to be reasonably well known up here. Explains why Fi used to say stuff like “This is the Ned that we met at the hotel.”

I managed to move into a different room the following term. Anyway, you’d ha’ thought someone called Pike wouldn’t be making jokes about their name.

I couldn’t work out why it’d been necessary to make us share in the first place. That building was three quarters empty. You could walk down its long corridors and not meet a soul. I’d open doors and look in and see more empty rooms, same white walls, same small windows, same lack of view. There was a coffee bar, but no-one ever used it. No juke box, no people, no life. Back in Southampton, I’d spent so much time in the coffee bar, so much time there, just hanging out leaning against the juke box, listening to the Pistols, watching the rest of the student population walk past. This one was different. Just a counter selling tea or coffee. To no one. The refectory up there was the same. Too clean, too lifeless. The union building had some life, so I’d go there for a sandwich at lunchtime, but the campus was just the place I worked. For the real stuff: sitting around talking about music and what’s important, we had the Palace of Marchmont for that.

Pete moved out after the first term, but he kept coming back, probably to carry on arguing with Gav. There was a rumour that he’d moved in with one of his tutors. Pall, who knew Maggie, moved into Pete’s room. Pall was from one of those places near Manchester and was into all of those Manchester and Liverpool bands. I’ll tell you more about him in a minute or two.

Right now, though, there are a couple of things you need to know about what I was doing in Edinburgh. Actually, you don’t need to know them, but they might be interesting. My actual work was measuring rocks. Putting them in a machine, recording the values put out by the machine, and then using those values to work out the history of the earth. And you need two things to do that work: rocks and machines. We had the machines in Edinburgh. And we had 12 string Rick to look after them. The fun bit was getting the rocks. This is where the Prof used his contacts to come up with loads of exotic places to visit so we could raid their rock collection. So I got to visit France and Italy, Brazil and Chile, New York and Dumfries. Cruising round the south Atlantic or motoring over the Alps. However, all of that was a bit later. For that first term, I didn’t have any rocks to play with, so I mostly played with the machines, read in the library, and tried to avoid the smoke in my office.

The other thing I did in Edinburgh was assist the teaching of the undergrads. Showing them how to use the machines that measure the rocks that we collect on our raids so that they too can work out the history of the planet. Some of it was class work or lab work: looking at maps and stuff. However, the fun part was going out and doing the measuring in the field. It means you don’t have to lug the rocks back to the lab. You just have to lug the machines out into the wide and wonderful world. And these being undergrads, we can afford to go to the really exotic places like the Meadows, which I already told you about.

So that’s more or less all you need to know about Kings Buildings. Just the place where I worked.