My mother has developed a habit in the past month whereby, whenever we speak on the phone, she comments, ‘You haven’t written in that blog for a while.’ It’s true; according to the blog, I’ve either been dead or in a coma for the past five weeks. Oops. In my defence I did have application deadlines and a behemoth essay to write analysing Indian state and non-state interaction with sub-Saharan Africa (which was brutal, but now I can hold my own in discussions about the lines of credit offered by the Indian Export-Import Bank to Ethiopian agricultural actors and the capacity building initiatives undertaken by ITEC and SCAAP, which means I can bore the pants off people more effectively than ever). But since then I readily admit that I’ve had pretty much nothing to do. I’ve been at the gym. I’ve drunk a lot of coffee. I’ve spent a lot of time reading the papers—as in I’ve indulged in reading the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Financial Times from cover to cover quite regularly. Check out the vastness of that political spectrum! One could argue that as an IR student it’s part of my ‘work’, but it’s not that great of an argument.
Anyway.
Since my last pitiful attempts to run a blog (the beginning of November), I have survived three major trials: my last Raisin Weekend, the great Fife Snowpocalypse, and getting to the Edinburgh airport using public transport in time for a 9 am flight. Oh, and I went to Poland too. Poland, Raisin and Fife Snowpocalypse were all very enjoyable; waking up at 5 to catch a medley of buses and trains in atrociously cold weather was not. But for the most part, I’ve been savouring my last winter in St Andrews, pervasive darkness, sleet, diminuitive size, lack of nightlife and all. St Andys has been my home for the past three and a bit years and no one could ever deny its grey seaside beauty or its cosy small-town feel. And, of course, the wonderful bizarre alternate universe we all seem to inhabit here.
Raisin Weekend, for instance. I really don’t feel like explaining the whole academic children and parents and receipts and tea parties and foam fight thing, so I instead direct those of you not in the know to the following page: http://www.yourunion.net/raisin. As I’m now in my fourth year, it was time for the children to take revenge for those shots of low-grade gin I used to wake them up at 7 am on Raisin Sunday last year. Two of my sons, Bertie and Will, talked it up endlessly to the tune of ‘you will wish you had never been born’, and at first I was able to laugh this off because surely it was a joke! But it continued for weeks, and other people started to say things like ‘I heard what your kids are doing to you; it sounds terrible’ and ‘ooh, I don’t envy you’, and yours truly started to get uneasy. I had visions of the children funnelling a mix of gin, spiced rum, tequila, sambuca, box wine and green enchilada sauce into my mouth whilst I was tied to a chair, struggling and in agony (that combo would be my worst nightmare; I can’t even drink a G&T without making horrible squidgy faces and trying to pawn it off on someone else as soon as possible). So when I was told up to bring a bikini and show up at my daughter Averell’s flat at 11.30 am sharp—in St Andrews, punctuality is very important when it comes to the lash because the punishment for lateness is usually pretty disgusting—I was properly nervous.
Upon knocking, I was blindfolded by Bertie and led into the kitchen, where a glass was placed in my hand and I was told to down whatever was in said glass. I tried to sniff it and get some idea of how horrible it was, but then bit my tongue and knocked it back. It turned out to be very tasty, with a mild cocoa flavour and elegant balance of smoothness and bite. The blindfold was removed to reveal a very beautiful full Sunday brunch, which was one of the most wonderfully pleasant shocks I’ve ever gotten (especially considering my fears about a vicious gin revenge). The four of us toasted our stupidly good-looking and charismatic family, and Raisin Sunday officially began. My three wonderful children had not only cooked brunch, they had also stocked up the ingredients for some lovely drinks. There was a glorious supply of champagne and peach juice for bellinis, and bless their hearts, vodka, crème de cacao and Galliano for Golden Cadillacs, which they all knew is one of my favourite cocktails of all time. A few rounds later Will had ceased to actually measure any of the ingredients for the drinks and just dumped the rest of the vodka, crème de cacao and Galliano into a massive bowl and we were all dancing very badly around the kitchen, which appeared to really confuse the tourists that happened to be walking down North Street that day. Though that’s hardly the weirdest thing they would have seen that weekend—even on my walk over, I had witnessed people laughing maniacally as they sprayed whipped cream out their first floor window and a gaggle of boys clambering into the Market Street fountain completely naked.
What about that bikini? you might be wondering. Well, this is the point (about half 12 in the afternoon) where the kids told me to get go get changed, no ifs, ands or buts about it. I sensed that something potentially very bad was about to happen, but I was full of bellinis and Golden Cadillacs and couldn’t stop laughing, so against my better judgement I put on my bikini in Scotland in late November. We all waltzed and sang our way down to Castle Sands (‘SHAKE yo ass! WATCH yoself!’ and so on) and came to a collective halt where the frigid grey waves were crashing onto the sand. Surely they won’t actually make me do this, I thought to myself.
Disrobe! they ordered. Into the sea!
Yes, that is correct, my lovely academic children, who had so nicely made brunch and cocktails, were forcing me to go into the North Sea in November. The North Sea is brutally, horrifically, absurdly cold for the May dip; in November, there really are no words to describe it. As someone who functions best when it’s 35 degrees and sunny, the idea strikes me as particularly awful. I made a feeble, boozy and generally ineffective protest, and the next thing I knew I was standing whimpering in my bikini with my toes already gone numb and Will, his trouser legs rolled up to the knees, holding my hand. ‘Just go in up to your knees,’ he told me. ‘You don’t even have to go in all the way.’ That didn’t seem so terrible, so Will pulled me screeching into the surf so both our calves were underwater. Darling Will then proceeded to shove me over, and lacking the capability to balance at this point, I toppled into the waves and was drenched from head to toe. To make it worse, every time I tried to run away back to the shore, he would just knock me over again to much cheering from Bertie and Averell.
Had I been sober, I probably would have had a coronary from the cold, the shock and the sheer unpleasantness of flailing about in the North Sea in November. Thankfully the cocktails had fortified me somewhat or they at least just made the memory fuzzy. Eventually I was allowed to run back to the beach, where I cocooned myself in a towel and my coat and refused to put on my socks and boots because my feet were sandy. I was handed a flask of hot chocolate (which later turned out to be mostly vodka) and given a piggyback ride by Bertie back to North Street, where I de-sanded my feet and slumped over with a hot water bottle clutched to my chest. At this point it gets a little hazy; I’m told that as we waited outside for a taxi to take me home, I gave up on standing and sort of crumpled to the ground, which was very alarming to the group of tourists passing by. ‘She’s fine, she’s fine!’ shouted Bertie as he picked up my limp form and stuffed it into the back of the car. Somehow I doubt they were convinced; anyway, I was deposited back in my room at about 2 pm and had a lovely six-hour long nap from which I woke up very, very happy with my academic children and very, very happy to be at St Andrews.
Happy, happy, happy...so happy that I'm curling my toes
How could you not love a place like this?
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