Ruminations on my 24 hours away from St Andrews, part II

British ‘summertime’ is officially over. As far as I’m unofficially concerned, British summertime was over in late May, which saw the end of that fantastic three-day heatwave in St Andrews (which was great; everyone was lounging around in their shirt sleeves in beer gardens and getting sunburnt after their exams). Anyway, today was the first day where I looked out the window halfway through my three o’ clock tutorial to see St Andrews wreathed in darkness, with a fierce and icy rain striking the glass to boot. As I wrapped my head in my scarf to walk over to my four o’ clock Starbucks date, I watched my own fingers turn bluish white and felt a slow, sick dread roll over me. Indeed, winter is here…FOR THE NEXT SIX MONTHS. Maybe I exaggerate. But not by much! My sunlamp—the big square cube of light that sits on my desk and simulates UV rays and keeps me jolly in these dark months—is said to be most effective when turned on for ninety minutes a day, but in reality, it will be pulling much longer hours than that.

Anyway, I digress.

As I mentioned earlier, I spent last Thursday night down at the University of Durham attending a Bain & Company presentation, because they don’t send anyone up here. Considering that it’s widely acknowledged that St Andrews is generally superior to Durham in pretty much every way, this is perplexing (not that I’m biased or anything). I won’t go into details about the event itself, because it would probably bore the pants off anyone without a specific interest in consulting, apart from saying that it was really well done, definitely worth the trip, and ended with free wine and free case study interview technique CDs. It was being in the town of Durham that I found pleasant enough, but somehow weirdly unnerving.

Durham, for those without an intimate knowledge of UK university or cathedral towns, is in the northeast of England just south of Newcastle. It’s on the London-Aberdeen railway line and provides a lovely view of the castle and cathedral, which are perched on a hill above the River Wear, as you go by. If you look it up on Wikipedia there will be lots of stuff about ‘the finest examples of Norman architecture’ and so forth, and I believe they shot part of a Harry Potter film there, which gives you a general idea of how the place looks. I actually considered applying to uni there at the ripe old age of seventeen and visited with my mother in the summer of 2006; it was the first British university I visited (preceding York, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Trinity, Oxford, Bath and Cambridge). As our boisterous tour guide led us around St Chads college and made comments like ‘and you will become familiar with this pathway after stumbling down it on many a drunken night’, I could hear Mom making disapproving Marge Simpson noises under her breath. Later, as we went out for dinner, we were treated to lots of sloppy public renditions of what sounded like oom-pah-pah beer songs, as the centre of town was packed with students on the lash due to it being World Cup time. ‘I don’t know,’ my mom sniffed. ‘There seems to be quite a drinking thing going on here.’ Oh, Mom.

At any rate, I didn’t end up applying to Durham and haven’t given the place much thought for the past four years. I suppose it’s always been there in the back of my mind as a calling point on the east coast rail line and as a sort of B-list St Andrews—a kind of place for Oxbridge reject-rejects (but that’s a bit harsh, and opening up a whole other can of worms).* And now all of a sudden there I was, forced to blend in and pretend I was one of them! Well, not entirely, as I had emailed the Bain recruiting team early and asked if it was okay that I attend, even if I didn’t study at Durham, and they had said yes. But still!

What I found unnerving was that, in many ways, Durham is a lot like St Andrews. It’s a small, rural, self-contained town dominated by students. It’s very picturesque, with its magnificent architecture, cobbled streets, stone bridges, the river twining through, and its rolling fields all around. The student body seems to be decently international, as well (I think). There’s the standard array of high street shops, cafes and restaurants—Jack Wills, Costa, Pizza Express, et cetera. People even dress the same to some degree—pashminas adorn most necks. But it lulls a St Andrean into a kind of false sense of security, because the town is just different enough to throw you off.

Durham is small, but, as I set off through those cobbled streets, I became increasingly aware of the fact that it’s not quite as neatly contained. And picturesque as it may be, Durham, I realised, is full of hills. I had noticed that no one’s shoes seemed to have a heel of any kind—now I knew why. The heel on my black boots isn’t very big, but my feet, accustomed to the friendly flatness of St Andrews, began to complain. Another thing—those three streets we all joke about? They’re a blessing. The streets of central Durham twine up and down those hills without rhyme or reason, which is immensely frustrating when it’s nine at night and you’re looking for sustenance and you keep hitting dead ends, cathedrals, or dark alleyways that practically advertise themselves to rapists and crack dealers.

So it was of course immensely pleasant to arrive back home, where everything is within fifteen minutes’ walk and you have to be a veritable imbecile to get lost. There are times when it may be a bit claustrophobic, and when the weather makes you want to never go outside ever again, and when the sun sets before you even get a chance to look at it properly, but really—here’s to you, St Andrews. For so many reasons.

*I, too, was rejected from Oxford. I applied to do history and French with the idea that I would work in Central Africa, specifically the Democratic Republic of the Congo). After a disastrous interview up in Vancouver, during which I was given a block of text to discuss that was so dense and erudite that it literally made me shake with fear, those hopes were dashed. Frankly I’m glad that didn’t work out, because God knows I would have had much less fun and God knows where I would be right now. The Congo, probably.