Saturday 1 October

I've arrived in Cambridge!

Woken at seven, as usual, by The Bird. Felt kind of relieved that today is the last time I'm going to have to put up with it waking me at ridiculous o'clock squawking "Rise and shine! Rise and shine! Brush your teeth! Brush your teeth!" That's been my wake-up call every morning since forever, and I'm looking forward to nine weeks without it.

I've never gotten on well with that bird of Dad's. It's a sulphur crested cockatoo called Kiki, which he got for his birthday when he was ten years old. Aye, you read that correctly: ten, so Kiki is now thirty-six and still going strong. Cockatoos aren't like cats and dogs. They live for decades. They are also noisy, smelly and messy wee beasties, and they can deliver a painful bite. Kiki's speciality, when she's not reciting nursery rhymes or telling you to blow your nose and shut the door, is to make a noise like a train going through a tunnel. It's absolutely deafening and even after eighteen years of it, it still makes me jump out of my skin.

Anyone in their right mind would keep a beastie like Kiki confined to a cage in the living room—or better still, in the garden shed. But not Dad. He gives her the run of the house and won't hear a word of putting her in a cage. Birds are Dad's life. He's an ornithologist by profession—he teaches and researches the subject at the University of St Andrews, where he heads up a group that's trying to bring back the Great Auk from extinction. It's the same kind of idea that you see on Jurassic Park—insert ancient DNA into the cells of another, related species—only less ambitious because in Dad's case the DNA he's working with is only a couple of hundred years old rather than a couple of hundred million.

Got up and dressed in my usual attire. Plain navy blue sweatshirt, blue denim shorts, white athletic socks and Vans skate shoes. My white Sony noise cancelling headphones round my neck. That's been my signature look for as long as I can remember. My family members keep trying to persuade me to introduce a bit of variety to my wardrobe, but that would be a waste of brain cells if you ask me. Sticking to the one style makes it very quick and easy to get dressed in the morning: just grab one of each and you're done. I'll change from shorts to jeans when the clocks go back and strip down to a T-shirt if I get too hot, but that's about it. None of this faffing about with trying to match colours to each other or to your mood or to the price of tea in China or anything like that.

We set off from our home in Strathkinness at eight in the morning. The whole family had decided to come—Dad, Mum, my sister Carla (age sixteen), my brother Lewis (age fourteen) and, despite my protestations, The Bird. Dire Straits—Dad's favourite—playing on the car stereo. Stopped at the services on the M6 between Carlisle and Penrith for lunch then carried on south, arriving in Cambridge at about four where we dropped off my belongings in College.

Carla said I needed to rearrange all the furniture in my room.

I said to her I didn't want it rearranged. It was fine as it was.

She said, "But you need to. It's got bad feng shui. You need the right balance of yin and yang."

This is something that Carla and I don't see eye to eye about. Carla seems to get into just about every kind of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and New Age quackery that's going. I, on the other hand, am much more of a scientific sceptic. Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and with good reason. If it weren't so, you'd be giving people like Carla a free pass to make up anything they liked.

Said so.

She said, "You're a typical Capricorn, Samuel. Do you have to be so sceptical about everything? I'm sure you would solve a lot of your problems if you just tried it."

Aye, right. As if rearranging the furniture would make me one of the cool kids, get me a girlfriend, get me through my driving test, get The Bird to shut up, and get people like Carla to stop peddling nonsense. Get real.

Put up a couple of posters. One of the Andromeda galaxy above my bed and a couple of MC Escher prints above my desk, overruling Carla's objections that the Escher prints had bad qi, whatever bad qi is supposed to be. Then we headed off to auntie Dinah's for tea in Grantchester.

It's the first time I've seen auntie Dinah since she got elected to Parliament a couple of General Elections ago. She's put on a lot of weight since I last saw her—obviously they feed them well in Westminster. She served us up jerk chicken with rice and peas, which apparently is the most popular dish in the House of Commons restaurants. She said that the recipe is open source and gave us a copy. Might try cooking it myself at some stage.

Washed down with lashings of prosecco.

Or at least, she and Dad washed it down with lashings of prosecco. Mum declined and had a Diet Coke instead because she doesn't drink. Her sister was killed by a drunk driver when she was fourteen and she hasn't touched a drop of alcohol ever since. Carla and I, on the other hand, were given ginger beer. Honestly! Besides the fact that I don't like ginger beer, it reminded me of that open day a year ago—at Heriot-Watt if I recall correctly—when, after all the presentations by the professors, we went for refreshments where the tea lady served uncle Philip (who is Head of Science at my old school) and Mrs MacGregor (our Chemistry teacher) with tea but only gave us students that horrible orange squash that tastes like plastic. "Tea for the visitors, squash for the students," she said officiously. Nice one, Heriot-Watt. Ever thought of going into advertising?

She offered prosecco to Lewis though, until Mum stopped her. Reminded her that he's still only fourteen and not old enough to drink.

She said to Lewis, "Oh, I'm sorry, I must have got the two of you mixed up. I thought you were the one coming up to university. I could have sworn you were the older of the two."

Sigh. Et tu, auntie Dinah?

I get that all the time for some reason. People keep thinking that Lewis is older than me when in actual fact he's four years younger. When I was about twelve, people used to ask if we were twins. He laps it up of course and takes full advantage of it whenever he can. Me, on the other hand, I get ID'd when I try to buy wine gums in a newsagent's.

Auntie Dinah's big news is that since she was made a junior minister to the Foreign Office recently, she now has direct access to all the classified files about the adventures that she and Dad had when they were teenagers along with uncle Philip, auntie Lucy, The Bird and great uncle Bill.

I've heard one or two of these tales before. Dad likes to trot them out when he wants me to go Munro bagging with him rather than tinkering with electronic circuits or hacking on computer games. There may be an element of truth to some of them. He and auntie Lucy spent their holidays with uncle Philip and auntie Dinah when they were teenagers, and uncle Philip and auntie Dinah's mum (great auntie Allie) was dating a field agent from MI6 at the time (great uncle Bill), who she eventually ended up marrying, so it's inevitable that the four of them would get caught up in his investigations from time to time. But I can't help getting the impression that a lot of them are at best exaggerated and at worst completely made up.

The time when they all went down with the measles over Easter is a case in point here. I'd have thought they would all have been vaccinated against them by that point, but evidently not. According to the Office of National Statistics there were 82,054 cases of measles in 1986 and theirs were four of them. As they were recovering, their doctor prescribed them a two week camping holiday before they went back to school. I'd like to know what kind of doctor they had, because when I once asked my GP to prescribe me a two week camping holiday like that, he just said, "I'm a doctor, laddie, no' a travel agent." Clearly they do things differently up in Scotland to what they did in the south of England thirty years ago. But the four of them, plus The Bird plus great uncle Bill, all toddled up to the Hebrides for a fortnight of camping, sailing, fishing, sunbathing and (in Dad's case) geeking out about puffins and guillemots, only for great uncle Bill to end up being taken hostage by a gang of arms traffickers who had been hunting him down and were operating in the area.

Apparently, as well as taking great uncle Bill prisoner, the gang had smashed up their boat leaving them stranded. A couple of days later, along came a goofy looking bloke who said he was an ornithologist. Dad asked him a couple of questions and came to the conclusion he was most likely phony, so the four of them pushed the guy into a hole in the ground and made off with his boat, assuming he was one of the gang. They later found out, much to Dad's embarrassment, that he was the real deal, and to make matters worse, a few years later when Dad was applying for his PhD, he ended up being interviewed by that very same guy. Needless to say he didn't get it, and ended up going to St Andrews instead. But apparently he and this other bloke have been sworn enemies ever since.

The tales got spicier and spicier as auntie Dinah and Dad downed more and more prosecco. Auntie Dinah absolutely adores the stuff. Kept refilling her glass and Dad's over and over again as the meal progressed. Tried to get Mum to take some, which provoked the inevitable expletive-laden reaction. Didn't think to offer me any though, even though she'd been corrected on which of us was which. As a result, I remained as sober as anything while she and Dad got gradually more and more inebriated.

As I listened to them, I wondered if that they had both missed their calling and perhaps they should be writing adventure novels for teenagers. Dad certainly seemed to be trying to portray himself as another Alex Rider. Told us about how he'd once stowed away on an aeroplane so that he could rescue the other three of them from a castle in some Ruritania-like country or other called Tauri-Hessia, where they were being held hostage along with the country's Crown Prince.

I said I'd never heard of Tauri-Hessia.

Auntie Dinah said, "Just look it up on the map when you get a chance," and took another swig of prosecco. Then she started telling us all about some mountain or other in Wales that they'd stumbled on that supposedly contained some sort of secret laboratory conducting antigravity experiments. Antigravity experiments! As if that weren't enough, the outfit was headed up by a mad scientist who called himself "the king of the mountain." Seriously, it all sounded like Peer Gynt meets Stargate SG-1 with lashings of Manic Miner thrown in for good measure.

Meanwhile, Carla was giving a running commentary throughout. She had a lot to say about the fact that their boat in the Hebrides was called the Lucky Star. Said that Jupiter must have been in the ascendant or some nonsense like that. As for the Stargate of Adventure in the Welsh mountain, she said that the reason the antigravity wings weren't working was because the mountain had bad feng shui. Didn't seem to occur to her that a more likely explanation as to why the antigravity wings weren't working is that antigravity is not a thing.

The Bird was pretty much the worse for wear too. It had been surreptitiously dipping its beak into Dad's glass when it thought nobody was looking and was now staggering round the table making gurgling noises. It was at this point that Mum decided that enough was enough, so she put the bottles of prosecco back in the fridge and got me to help the two of them up to bed. That done, she and Lewis took me back to College, leaving Carla to keep an eye on things. They stayed with me for about half an hour, helping me to unpack, then headed back to auntie Dinah's where they're spending the night before heading back up north in the morning.

And so, to bed for my first night in Cambridge. Wondering what my neighbours are like. Hopefully they'll be nice and friendly. I'm dead tired after the long journey and just want to get some sleep. There's a funny noise coming from under my bed, but I'm too tired to investigate just now. Will check it out in the morning and report it at the Porters' Lodge if it's a problem. But it's nice to have a room to myself. Back home I've been sharing a room with my brother for as long as I can remember. A lot of students in St Andrews have to share too.