Myerscough College Early 2001

The year 2001 dawned and I found myself specifically invited to bid for some JISC project funding to participate in a project aimed at passing information from the college Management Information System on students to the online-learning platform. The project was known as the Interoperability Project.

This meant me liaising with both our MIS software people, Capita and the online learning software people. A quarter of a century on, I have tried to remember the software's name but can't. This despite me travelling one time flying from Liverpool to Dublin to give a talk on the benefits and methods of running user groups to Irish college staff, with the representative of this other software speaking after me.

I had delegates announce themselves around the huge conference table and every single person had a different accent as they had all come from every corner of Ireland. It was wonderful. Plus we had stayed in the Medical University in Dublin and had been offered a chance to observe an operation the evening before the meeting (we declined) and were served a "full Irish" breakfast the following morning. Remarkably like a full English but with white pudding instead of black pudding. (This latter also declined...!)

Anyway I had to attend a few meetings for the project with one being in York. I arrived after starting to feel unwell the evening before, fell into my hotel bed at 5:30pm and rolled out again the following morning half dead and just drove home without attending.

We had lots of very cold weather and freezing fog in the mornings. The weak bridge on St Michael's Road near the college got some attention whilst we had traffic lights for weeks.

The Myerscough server room. It was accessed from the technicians' room and was air-conditioned and equipped with fire detection equipment and huge tanks of some sort of fire-fighting gas. We had a fire-proof safe for storing backups of data and the servers ran a mirror system where data was replicated amongst them. Thousands of students create a lot of data...

Work was starting on a new classroom block and laboratories. These catered for soil sample testing and all sorts of chemical horticultural and other biological matter to be cut up, broken down to consistuent parts, discussed and poked in a safe and controlled way. No-one, whilst I was working there, was ever bitten by a radioactive spider and had to be coaxed off the roof...

There will be chance to watch the new building taking shape in further articles as all this happened right outside my office window. Watch this space... No... this one...

Did I mention grotty weather earlier? Fields were flooded for weeks on end, meaning crops were destroyed or sparse and that the ground was left unsuitable for re-seeding for the Spring for crops to be harvested in Autumn. Making it worse was that spring seed itself was scarce due to bad weather in the previous year. All of this affects available foodstuffs in your local grocery stores.

And then to make matters much worse - foot and mouth disease hit. From my news pages on the college website: 22 Feb 2001 - Foot & Mouth Precautions

Whilst there are currently no official restrictions in place for Lancashire, foot and mouth disease is an extremely infectious disease. A very small quantity of the virus is capable of infecting an animal and the disease could spread throughout the country if no attempt were made to control it. Just one infected animal confirmed would mean the slaughter of all animals on a farm.

Myerscough College is restricting vehicle access to the college farms and control measures such as the disinfecting of footwear is being put in place at the farms, Animal Academy and Equine Unit.

The recently acquired Virtual Learning Environment (the online-learning platform mentioned beforehand) now became the salvation of the college. As can be imagined, many of our students came from farms, or farming families. Their parents or employers took them away from college to minimise the risk of cross-contamination of their own and/or college livestock and had it not been for the academic staff's swift take-up of the new system (nothing to do with me, by the way) the college would have been devastated.

By the end of March we were able to welcome Bill Beaumont the ex-rugby international, now playing celebrity golf matches, to open our new Golf Academy. This had lots of facilities from computer-controlled screens that showed photos of real golf courses and that registered the speed and direction of a ball whacked at it (note the technical language here...) and then simulated where the shot would land, to oversized plastic clubs for use by visiting groups of school children to introduce them to the game.

A few of us were playing tenpin bowling as a team in a league at a bowling alley in Preston. On 11 April 2001 we went to play at a charity event for the NW Air Ambulance at the alley in Morecambe. We fielded two teams of six players against another 36 teams. Our team got through to the finals, eventually finishing in 6th position after a great night's bowling..

In May 2001 we had a surprising new arrival at Myerscough's Animal Academy. Meet Pterry, the emu - so called because the size of his or her feet reminded staff of a pterodactyl! Pterry hatched out of one of two eggs given to the college by a nearby farm and grew quickly in size since hatching. He or she had doubled in size in just a couple of days and would in no way fit back into that egg!

Staff were hoping that the other egg would produce a brother or sister for Pterry. The egg was rolling about of its own accord so there was something alive and strong in there, but sadly the movements stopped before the egg hatched.

Incubation period for an emu egg is normally between 47-55 days with Pterry hatching right on cue at 49 days. The eggs had to be kept around at a temperature of 95 degrees and 75-80% humidity with the eggs being turned manually by staff five times a day. Emus will grow to between five and six feet in height in their first year, reaching maturity at two years.

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