Several theories were suggested, and the conclusion was reached that Something Ought to be Done.

That something turned into an annual institution for the club, a Christmas card building workshop held at Edinburgh University. Dr Hill soon knocked up a few trillion circuit boards, using a chip from Maplin to flash eight LEDS in sequence. Everyone loved it, and several hundred cards must have been built over the years.

But then, two years ago, disaster struck. Maplin found a mistake in their catalogue, and instead of 35p, the chips suddenly became £2.50. But Dr Hill, resourceful as ever, ordered a PIC programmer, showed me how it worked, and handed me the instruction book.

In short, I learned very quickly how to program fifty pence microcontrollers to flash LEDs. There are actually several advantages to doing things this way, the main one being that you can program any pattern you want, rather than being stuck with the one pattern on the previous chip.

This was several weeks before red nose day, and the inevitable happened.

In the intervening two years I've learnt enough to shrink the circuit so it actually fits inside the nose. Dr Hill ran off a couple of hundred circuit boards, with surface mount resistors, a pic12c509 microcontroller and a watch battery. Soldering the circuits together was a mammoth task, but even harder, as we discovered rather too late, was getting the them into the noses. A million thanks to everyone who was press-ganged into helping at the last minute.

Red nose day itself was a great success. Mr Hynd, our lab technician, had his hair cut into a triple mohican in front of the whole school, after getting pupils to vote from a choice of four alternative styles. The noses had already sold out weeks before. Together, we raised over £750 for Comic Relief.

Our noses went right to the top - guess what Janet Rougvie of Heriot Watt University and her team are wearing in this picture...

And guess what Cathy Jamieson (then Secretary of State for Education) and Ian Jenkins (our local MSP) are wearing in this picture...