The nefarious UHI Millenium Institute...

Isn't the UHI Millennium Institute a wonderfully evocative, slightly sinister name? For me, it has always summoned up a Scottish setting for James Bond or similar foiler of nefarious plots aiming at world dominion. In my peat-addled imagination, I see a neo-classical New Town façade with a polished brass nameplate, succeeding to an interior of old wood, bookcases, pipe-smoke,  decanters and heavy crystal-ware glasses, guttering gas lamps throwing sinister old men with high Edinburgh accents in red leather armchairs into hideous, Mephistophelean relief. Avowedly, of course, the Institute would be a philanthropic research organisation, perhaps with rather misguided Whiggish views on milleniumising the "Third World". Not so, naturally. A quick tug at a copy of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe in the Institute's extensive, foosty library would cause one of these groaning cases to click smoothly inward, revealing a startlingly chromed, glaziered interior. Tweeds and bumpers of port would give way to corridors replete with shuffling men and women in white coats walking in clipped, purposeful steps from laboratory to laboratory. No doubt the air would be abuzz with electrical energy and the dull, dulcet thumping as screams rebounded off padded cells. I've not entirely decided quite what they'll actually be up to, but I'm inclined to think that this Tartan Taliban band intend to unite the ancient virtues of Scots industry and piety, using scientific engineering to precipitate the apocalypse. No doubt they will be foiled by our brave protagonist and their industries reduced to molten slag and scorched and pitted blonde sandstone.

In point of fact, the UHI Millennium Institute isn't based in Edinburgh, but in Inverness. Nor, I'm happy to say, is it a conglomerate of dementedly pious scientists bent on annihilation and the Rapture. Rather, its a Higher Education Institute, conducting university-level education in the Highlands and Islands. I noticed this morning that the Scottish Government are consulting on recognising this level of education by bestowing the status "university" on the institution. If so, it will join the fourteen other higher education institutions in the country with that status, two of which I've attended on my own educational travels. Happily these days a Papal Bull is no longer necessary for the status to be conferred, so the Institute needn't persecute Benedict the Umpteeth with petitions during his imminent papal visit to Scotland. If their petitions are successful, the institution will presumably transmogrify  into the University of the Highlands and Islands. Personally, I would have preferred the more quixotic alternative of "Millennium University" but such an institution already exists in Bangladesh. Regrettably, neither of these options sounds nearly as gently malevolent as its current title.  My imagination smarts from the potentially imminent loss of a setting. Indeed, both suggest bright eyes, optimism, good cheer, new foundations - decidedly un-Scottish virtues for a would-be supervillain...