At midnight on Friday 31 October, my Napier laptop locked me out, telling me that my account had expired. This wasn’t a malfunction: I had just transmuted from a Senior Research Fellow to a Senior Visiting Fellow.

Nor was it a surprise: it had been decided my SRF role would end, and I think the redundancy payment was generous. Hazel has blogged about my work at Napier: I’m quite proud of my achievements. Of course I’m hugely grateful to colleagues for their support and kindness over the years.

About the photo at the bottom of Hazel’s piece: as well as COVID-disconnections, I had family issues that took me far from Edinburgh. I asked Hazel and Rachel to take on some of my RIVAL admin, and gave them the fake beards to help with these transformations.

Despite the decision that my SRF role would end, I wanted to carry on supervising a PhD student. I’d become her Director of Studies after the original DoS had taken a well-earned retirement, and I didn’t want her to lose both supervisors. Fortunately, Napier was happy to facilitate this.

So what am I going to do now? Firstly, support my ever-wonderful wife better than I have been! Much more of the domestics, with cooking aided by a lovely new cook-book given to me by Peter. I also want to learn more Austrian vegan recipes. The flat needs a lot of tidying and maintenance. We would benefit from a more efficient and quieter server. (Currently, we have a 2012 Mac Pro with multiple internal and external spinning rust, running macOS Sequioa under OpenCore Legacy Patcher.)

Of course I have other IT-ish plans. My main Mac needs nuking and paving to macOS Tahoe. I want to find a version of Linux and userland software that will suit my 2015 MacBook Air. I want to play Carmageddon and other classic Mac games on my Pismo and/or iBook G3. (Pismo is waiting for a new optical drive and for me to understand why the drive cable won’t connect an SSD. iBook is understandably nervous about surgery to give it an SSD and a DVD drive.) 

I’m still interested in information science, especially information literacy, so I’ll have some involvement in research led by Napier colleagues. I’m about half-way through writing a paper on information literacy and society – a more academic version of this report. I plan to create an academic paper from the school librarians and mis-/disinformation report. I want to update my map of Edinburgh’s community councils, following the boundary-changes earlier this year. Back to adventures with QGIS and shapefiles! I plan to remain secretary of the Scottish Media and Information Literacy Community of Practice.

I’ll continue to take minutes and run the website for New Town and Broughton Community Council. I’ll also remain on LeithChooses’ steering group. Our work including checking that applications are eligible, and helping to become so if necessary, then setting up the in-person and online public votes for January. I build each year’s gallery of applications and do other techie stuff.

I want to become fitter and get back on my much-neglected bike. More cycle-travels in Europe are much wanted. We’ve also just become members of Drumsheugh Baths Club, so I’m getting back into swimming.

I both want and need to improve my German. We’ll be staying in Vienna for all of March 2026. (This is a 60^th birthday present from my wife – I told you she’s wonderful!) I also plan to apply for Austrian citizenship. So I need to work through tonnes of my mother’s documents – they’ve being lying under my desk for four years.

I think that’s enough to keep me busy!