There’s a doctor in the house, thanks to Edinburgh Napier University - Susan Morrison
When the email arrived I had to read it twice. Edinburgh Napier, a university which I have always held in the highest regard, wished to bestow an honorary degree on me.
Ah, I thought, it's one of these mix-ups. They’ve got the wrong Susan Morrison. It's happened before.
At an opening of a Jack Vettriano event I once had a baffling conversation with a terribly posh chap about the geographical difficulties of editing the New Yorker Magazine. It must be, he opined, difficult to do from Leith.
Oh no, I said, it would be easy with modern communications. Yes, he continued, but physically getting to gallery openings might be a challenge. Not at all, I said. The Number 22 bus stops right outside.
Three thoughts hit him simultaneously. One, I was not Susan Morrison, editor of the New Yorker Magazine and writer of ‘Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary:’ Two, what is a ‘bus’? And three, he suspected he was talking to a peasant who’d blagged her way in for the free wine.
He abruptly broke off to beetle over to a man he thought was Jack Vettriano. Turned out, it was, but Jack remembered this bloke from a previous encounter and had also been tanning the shiraz. Didn’t end well.
So, I assumed, honorary doc is not for me. Answered the email, explained the confusion. What larks, eh? Got another email back and was assured, yes, it was me, right enough. Napier doesn’t make mistakes, in my experience.
Well, I thought. What brought this on? Well, they said, they’d like to honour me for the work I do, giving their fabulous academics a stage to talk to the public about their brilliant research.
Honestly, it's not like this is hard work. Everyone thinks academics are shy. They're not. It's easy to lure them out. I leave pages of a potential funding bid along the ground and they follow the trail, like Hansel and Gretel following the bread crumbs.
Once I get them under the stage lights, they fall under the showbiz spell and have a whale of a time talking about their incredible work.
We’ve had a young academic exposing some fairly horrible advertising techniques; another who asked why people confess to crimes they didn’t commit and a young American who taught us how to spot fake news. All three have important lessons for today's world.
Oh, I said, you can’t give me an award for having fun. And not just that, the sheer amount of mind-boggling facts I store up every year makes life just pure joy for me, my family and everyone I talk to, even the people who are in a lift with me and pretend to get out a floor earlier so they can ‘get their steps up’.
Napier, as an establishment, gave something of a heavy sigh. I’m reading between the lines here, but I sensed a polite but firm manner. To paraphrase, they said, ‘zip it Morrison, we’re putting a gown on you, a bonnet on your head and you’re going to be a doctor’.
So, there we have it. Thanks to Napier University, if someone asks if there is a doctor in the house, then I can bound forward, but remember, there has never been and will never be a situation I cannot make worse.
It’s ridiculously wonderful. Thank you, Napier.