A big jolly goedemorgen from Amsterdam

I was having withdrawal symptoms—restlessness, irritability, cold shaky hands, relentless grinding of my teeth. I couldn’t concentrate. I would find myself picking up a book or logging into The Times online only to lose interest in a matter of minutes. My mind would race in such a way that it actually made me anxious, and somehow I was both full of nervous energy and lethargic as a parched houseplant.

If you read the title of this post, automatically assumed this was about drugs, and shook your head at my destructive ways, shame on you! Tainting my good name!

No, I’m talking about a different kind of withdrawal. As I woke up on the 23rd of October, I realised that it was the longest I hadn’t been on a plane in about four years. I had been on the island from June straight through until October, a full four months. No casual city breaks, no fleeing to the tropics to fend off the winter blues, no getting stranded in a tiny heat-blasted Gulf state, no brother’s university graduation that warranted hopping across the Atlantic, no long weekends in Beijing, no high-powered urgent business meetings requiring me to hop on a jumbo jet to the southern hemisphere ASAP! (They tell me that the last one is rather unlikely for a brand-new graduate at the bottom of the professional food chain.)

And so I found myself sat cross-legged on the floor of my aunt’s sitting room in Belgravia, left hand curled around a mug of green tea, right hand gesturing grandly as I tried to explain my painfully bourgeois variety of malaise. Most people would have given me a dry look and asked me to come back with a real problem, but I knew my aunt Louisa would empathise. You see, my dear auntie was a freelance travel writer for years, popping back and forth between the UK and Mauritius and Burma and Sri Lanka and Brazil and Indonesia on a weekly basis, and is still well-known amongst the luxury travel journo/PR set in London. She, too, has set a personal record for staying in one spot in the past few months, and fully understood the all-consuming desire to just get on a plane and fly.

So acute was my longing to travel that I tallied the hours I spent on planes in the 2010 calendar year. It came out to 140, or roughly nine days. We’re not talking getting to and from the airport or layovers or going through security, either, this is raw air-time. I had unwittingly trained my body to expect the packing of suitcases and the shedding of boots onto conveyor belts and the scanning of departure boards and that sweet hard rush of being launched into the sky. No wonder I felt weird. The highest I had been in the past four months was Hampstead Heath.

Dear God, I thought, I will do anything to get on a plane and go somewhere.

And just like that, thanks to a tatty old page buried in the middle of my passport, an excuse to travel fell into my lap.

Back in 2007, I was issued a British student visa (my passport arrived from the Los Angeles consulate quite literally the day before I was scheduled to depart for term at St Andrews—nerve-wracking, to say the least). The visa expired not at the end of June 2011, just after graduation, but the end of October, presumably given the bearer time to apply for a post-study work visa. I had meant to do this, but then realised that if I wasn’t working at a place that strictly required an £800 visa, then why buy one? I had until April to make my application, so why not wait a few months to spend that money and have the post-study visa expire in April 2014 rather than October 2013? It made a lot more sense, but it did make me wonder what would happen if I overstayed by 31 October 2011 expiry date. To the internet! After looking through various ‘ZOMGZ MY VISA EXPIRES N LIKE 5 MINS CAN ANY1 TELL ME WUT 2 DO KTHANX!!1!1!!’ forums, I was able to discern that overstaying a visa may not give you any trouble leaving Britain, but when it came time to applying for another visa, you could kiss your chances goodbye. That could only mean one thing.

I had to get out of Britain, and I had eight days to do it.

Had to! Literally! It was a bureaucratic necessity. Unless I wanted to seriously screw up my future, I had no choice. I nearly dropped to my knees and thanked the god I don’t believe in. My zeal renewed and kicked into high gear, I started the search for cheap last-minute flights. I had originally planned to spend the Halloween weekend at some St Andrews medic friends’ party in Manchester, so I figured I might as well fly out of there on the 31st. And as long as I was at it, why not just fly up into Edinburgh and pop up to St Andrews? Before I knew it, a simple weekend in Manchester turned into a ten-day three-legged journey where I zigzagged across Britain and the Netherlands in planes, trains and coaches. I could almost feel my muscles and my mind settle as the relief coursed through my veins. As I prepared to pack up my trusty royal blue suitcase with the feather-light frame, I fished my passport out of its designated nook. It was time for its little navy self to come out of hibernation and to gather some Dutch stamps.

Meanwhile, my aunt had arranged to meet a friend from California in Paris for the weekend, setting out on the Eurostar a few hours before I left for Manchester. When I came over to say goodbye, I found her packing, and she was utterly thrilled about it. ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I’m so excited—I get to pack! I can’t believe I ever complained about doing this!’ I told her to have a fabulous time in Paris and she me in Manchester and Amsterdam. ‘And we’ll see you when you’re back. When is that, exactly?’ she called as she plucked a top out of the closet.

‘Well, I’m taking a few days up in Scotland after Amsterdam, so around the 8th or the 9th,’ I told her. ‘It was all a bit…impromptu.’

‘That’s nearly two weeks! You’re going to be properly gone!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve been plotting to travel, haven’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ I admitted, a smile creeping into my face.

And now, on the second of November, I have woken up to a radiant sunny day in Amsterdam, where the leaves are a riot of reds and golds and everyone has just started to wrap themselves in woolly scarves. And in the eyes of Westminster, I am really and truly no longer a student. It’s bittersweet, and I can’t think of a better place to come to terms with it than Amsterdam, one of my favourite cities on the planet. And I figure that if a 55-minute flight across the Channel can make me feel so good, it can hardly be wrong.

Life After Uni: It's a Riot

I am fully aware that the last thing I posted is three months old, but I’m not sure that I can be bothered to make excuses or justifications. Erm...I've been busy? Anyway, here we are.

When it comes to the shift from university to ‘the real world’, clichés abound—stuff like ‘the beginning of the rest of your life’, ‘becoming a “real person”’, et cetera. If I’m entirely honest, though, I haven’t had one of those moments where I realise, with a hugely jolting shock, that, ‘Oh my God, my life has changed ENORMOUSLY!’ I suppose that was what was in my mind when I titled the blog ‘In Transit’, because this is meant to be THE transition. So I’m a little bit disappointed that I haven’t had some major epiphany. But then I thought about it. I’ve worked during the summer since I was fifteen, having done full-time summer jobs all through uni, so I’m used to working nine-hour days. I worked in a proper office job last summer, so I’m used to looking presentable, commuting and using my brain. I’ve had my own flat, I’ve had a salary, I’ve managed my finances, I’ve lived overseas, I’ve lived in a massive city. Is my ‘new life’ really that different, then?

Well, no. All of ‘adult life’ was kind of expected, in which case, thanks are due to my parents. Congratulations, Mom and Dad, you raised a kid who’s not having a nervous breakdown about replacing a light bulb (in all seriousness, I mean that—I’ve been really lucky to have the opportunities that made THE transition so smooth). On paper, all the stuff looks rather monumental...

1. I wore a sombre black robe and got handed a diploma (ie I graduated). For one rather surreal week, my family and I stayed in St Andrews and drank a lot of champagne. I had stressed that, although it may have been June and California may have been Barcelona-sunny, Scotland would be grey, cool and breezy. They soon realised that I was not exaggerating and expressed wonder at how I had survived there for four years. Anyway, one long, Latin-filled ceremony and one mind-shattering graduation ball later, I found myself on the Caledonian Sleeper to Euston, bidding goodbye to St Andrews and goodbye to Scotland. It’s not like I was heading off to war, and plans have already been made for a cheeky weekend back up, so this was a lot less emotional than it could have been.
























This is me, but edumacated

2. I signed a contract for a job in London. A few years ago, this would have been entirely unremarkable, but now that the global economy is in the toilet, it does feel like slightly more like an accomplishment. It’s in PR, which isn’t my dream industry, but it puts money in the old RBS savings every month, so...you know. Amongst other things, it gives me an excuse to shop at Banana Republic for things like grey pinstriped trousers, which, if you’re unemployed, just look kind of try-hard.
























Employment is SO cool!

3. I signed a contract for a flat, also in London. When I was in California for the three weeks between the end of term and graduation, my brother told me, ‘You’re going to be living in a hovel—just so you know’. Ted has never exhibited any clairvoyant tendencies (rather, any particularly acute ones), so I’m not sure where he got that, but it turned out to be wrong. There are a few cons—it looks a little like a crack den from the outside, our landlord is kind of a bitch, and I accidentally blew up the oven a few weeks ago—but the interior is lovely. It gets tonnes of light, has a massive and recently refurbished kitchen, and comes complete with a balcony. On top of that, it’s a stone’s throw from Clapham Common and the tube. We also have a lot of Caribbean neighbours with gloriously cool accents, and, true to the Caribbean stereotype, they listen to really catchy music and cook food that smells delicious. Allie and I are working on getting a dinner invite somewhere.
























We looked at a flat about two feet away from this sign. Unsurprisingly, we opted not to live there.

4. I established a routine whereby I commuted from aforementioned flat to aforementioned job. Every morning, I hit the snooze button a few times, pelt out the door about ten minutes later than I intend to, and squeeze onto a Northern line train whose person-to-space ratio rivals that of the Shanghai metro at rush hour. After my first week of work, I admit that I was so exhausted that, zombie-like, I boarded a northbound Victoria train instead of the southbound one that would take me home. I completely failed to register the stop at Green Park and got to Oxford Circus before I realised that something wasn’t quite right. It also kind of makes me hate the general public even more than usual—I find that my ‘excuse me’ sounds more like a threat than a request these days—but Clapham Common to Victoria is a short commute by London standards (thirty minutes).
























How commuting makes me feel sometimes

...but, let’s be honest, everyone does this (apart from blowing up the oven). Unless they get signed for a record deal or descend into hipsterdom. How I hate hipsters.

Things wasn’t quite expecting?

1. The worst riots London has seen in thirty years...in my backyard. I’ve been lucky enough to have avoided pretty much any kind of violent conflict in my lifetime, but as someone who’s never even been mugged, I can’t help but worry on occasion that I’ve got a bull’s eye between my shoulder blades, or maybe a flashing neon sign on my forehead that reads ‘WALKING UPPER-MIDDLE CLASS CASHPOINT WITH MINIMAL UPPER ARM STRENGTH’. Needless to say, when the news said that there were a thousand angry, fearless rioters making their way up Lavender Hill towards my house, I was a bit shaken. After Allie pointed to flames and hooded figures on her computer screen and said, ‘Look, we’re on the news’, the two of us, doing our best to seem casual, drew all the blinds and locked and barricaded our doors. My little chilli plant, which lives on our kitchen window sill, seemed especially vulnerable with its delicate green stalks waving in the air, so I tucked it behind the toaster. It then dawned on me that the looters were going after plasma TVS, not chilli plants, and that if a bunch of lawless yobs broke into my house, I would do better to worry about my laptop, jewellery, or skull. The riots themselves have stopped, but this whole thing, whatever it may be, is far from over. When people ask where I live and I tell them Clapham, I get a response that goes something like ‘Oh my God, was your flat okay?’, usually accompanied by a concerned and sinister ‘oooh’ sound. It’s as if I said that I grew up Darfur.

















What immediately comes to mind when I tell people where I live (photo actually taken in Croydon, I'll have you know)

2. Even ‘real people’ get excited about free food and free booze. Last Wednesday, we had a company rounders tournament and picnic in Hyde Park (company-mandated fun) that included a load of wine, sandwiches, quiche, hummus, crudités, and those delicious vegetable crisps that I wish weren’t so expensive. As we all clustered on our blankets and watched the sky fade to dusky pink, the main topic of conversation was, yes, the free food and booze. Similarly, the last half hour of Friday afternoons, which sees a company-wide ‘tea’ where ‘tea’ actually means ‘wine’, is when my coworkers are at their most animated. The cheese twists and chocolate buttons are practically hoovered up, the company manages to work through half a dozen bottles of sauvignon blanc in an impressively short time, and chatter fuelled by weekend euphoria fills the room. When, if ever, do free food and booze become less exciting?



















Cue mass hysteria!

3. A taste for seriously black coffee. As someone who fixes her coffee in such a way that it wouldn’t look out of place on a Viennese dessert cart, believe me, this was unexpected. I’ve found myself brewing coffee so strong and dense it could probably sit up and bark. Rocket fuel. Liquid crack black as the night. So intense that, if I brew a cafetiere and leave it in the kitchen downstairs, I feel obligated to leave a warning note. It leaves me feeling like that guy in Get Him to The Greek after he gets an adrenaline shot to the heart, which isn’t a good thing per se, but it definitely beats the sinking exhaustion brought on by, you know, being awake in the morning. I thought that caffeine addiction was just one of those office clichés, but it turns out that a good dose of it really does make work more bearable.














Me after my morning cup o' joe

4. There’s a fox that loiters outside my window at night. Yes, a real-live fox in Zone 2. What? Would you have expected that?















Hehehe!

I’m sure there are others too.

So. ‘Real life.’ All that I’ve come to conclude is that it’s not nearly as terrifying as everyone makes it out to be, but also that it doesn’t inspire some kind of massive celebration where there are champagne corks flying and everyone dressed to the nines.



















Hooray for not being a total screwup!

Not the next Aesop’s fables, but I suppose I can leave you with something about life being a journey, not the destination.

Hmm. That’s pretty milquetoast. Check back in a bit.

Various methods of procrastination during revision

As graduation encroaches, so does the end of my career as an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews. I've really come to love the things I study, but if it were up to me, I would just sit down with my tutors and have an intellectual discussion over a chardonnay rather than the draconian system of biannual examinations. Surely we should be marked on our chat, not just our ability to regurgitate information. Nevertheless, the university appears to still be giving us exams, which means long, torturous days of slogging through badly taken notes and prose that most definitely qualifies as turgid. Yes, we have entered the twilight zone of revision. To be fair, though, most of us spend a lot more time griping about revision than actually undertaking it, and when we finally actually sit down to do some work, 'something more interesting' always seems to come up. Wink, wink.

1. Looking up private islands for sale in the South Pacific. I've never been to the South Pacific, it rarely comes up in the news, and I never encountered it over the course of my studies (the region does not figure prominently in Russian history or Chinese foreign policy, unsurprisingly). My vague notions of the South Pacific are mostly derived from Conde Nast articles and childhood visits to Hawaii, so, within the confines of my head, it has remained a great unblemished paradise of sorts. And it turns out that properties for sale in Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji et al go for prices that are far from exorbitant-you can buy half of a private island in Bora Bora for just over USD3 million. This seems like a bargain.









Looks decent


2. Excessive, borderline-psychological-disorder-style tidying. Five minutes into a journal article I usually have a mini-freakout over my room being 'filthy'. All surfaces are cleared, disinfected and reordered. All clothes are folded, hung up and stowed, with the laundry sorted into lights, darks and delicates. All stray papers are discarded or filed. All creases in the duvet are fastidiously smoothed; in extreme cases I usually end up changing the sheets and pillowcases even if they were just washed. This is a classic. Everyone knows that a student's bedroom is at its cleanest when an essay deadline or exam is looming.











My bleach usage skyrockets during exam time


3. Personal beautification. I think I've plucked my eyebrows about six times in the past seven days. They don't look all that different-I have a healthy fear of overplucking them-which means that really, I've just spent a lot of time cross-legged on the bathroom counter with my face smushed up against the mirror doing nothing. When I want something more time intensive, I plaster my skin with a clay masque, wait for it to dry, wash it off and moisturise. It takes about ten minutes for it to dry, and I have managed to convince myself that, for those ten minutes, I can't possibly revise. Logically, this is entirely untrue. If I'm really desperate, I clip my nails.













Seriously, don't overpluck

4. Naps. Never a huge fan of office chairs, I do most of my academic work sitting cross-legged on my bed with my back against the wall. Unfortunately, it is nearly effortless to tip over so that my head lands on the pillow, and we all know that from there it's a lost cause.










When I'm out, I'm out


5. Looking up how much it would cost to fly to [obscure faraway destination here]. It would cost 635 pounds to fly from London to Antananarivo (capital of Madagascar, for those too lazy to pull up Google maps) if one embarked on the 16th of March and returned on the 31st.










Central Antananarivo looks just gorgeousss

6. Trying on various formal dresses and high heels. You know, just to remind myself what they look like.













It turns out this dress and heels look exactly the same


7. Downloading most of VH1's Top 100 Dance Songs of the 90s. I am now the proud owner of hits such as Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) by C+C Music Factory, Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot, Bad Touch by Bloodhound Gang, MMMBop by Hanson, and Precious by Depeche Mode. I don't like, have never liked, and probably never will like Depeche Mode, and chances are that I will never listen to the others after next Wednesday (last exam).










The 90s were totally rad!


8. Newfound enthusiasm for the gym. At least this one is healthy and constructive-it might provide an opportunity to listen to my new 90s dance hits, gives me the chance to interact with other human beings, pumps me full of endorphins and of course prevents me from becoming a fatass. Plus, if every visit entails cardio, core, stretching, AND sixty minutes in the shower/moisturising my legs/waiting for my hair to dry, one casual innocuous-sounding gym session can take up a good two and a half hours.










What would probably happen if exams went on indefinitely


9. Watching 'educational' documentaries on North Korea. The DPRK has come up in my current module on Chinese foreign policy, but, if I'm entirely honest, it's really not important enough to merit my watching multiple documentaries on the whackjobbery of Kim Jong-Il and his father. It's just so incredibly BIZARRE. How does someplace like that still exist?! Isn't it incredible that there's a whole North Korea that we, the wider world, know absolutely nothing about?!! The more documentaries I watch, the more it blows my mind. And, erm, educates me.












I'll definitely be mentioning this in my IR exam


10. Anything. Really. Along with pretty much every single person in St Andrews at the moment, I'm starting to wonder if I have severe ADD.













Hey! Dressing up as a clown and learning to juggle seems like a constructive use of my time

Good luck, fellow St Andreans. The exams do end eventually.

...and one thing about Scotland that is not so awesome

Before any of you get all hot and bothered about the title of the post, it's not about 'the people' or the traditions or the culture or the right to be independent or anything like that. In fact, unless you or one of your loved ones works at the Apple store in Glasgow, there is nothing in here that you can or should take personally, so, you know, cool your jets. (ha)

Although I was somewhat loathe to come back to the UK after two hot, blissful weeks on the island of Sri Lanka—by all accounts, paradise—I’m now quite happy to be in London. I always forget how much I like the place until I’m back; I’ll be striding along happily with hordes of people, coffee in hand, when I realise, Oh, right, I actually really enjoy it here. When Natasha and I were sat beneath a creaking ceiling fan watching the tuktuks of Unawatuna whiz by in the bold equatorial sun, I had questioned my sanity about the decision to move here next year and made a note to start looking into something based in Honolulu, but false alarm! I think I’ve made the right call.

Another reason I’m genuinely excited about moving here? The Mac store. Specifically, the one on Regent Street.

Generally, I have a hard time caring about technology (my mobile looks like something you would get with a McDonalds Happy Meal, made worse by the crack that appeared in the screen after I got it back from Tel Aviv airport security), but I love my Mac. A lot. Love isn’t even the right word; at this point, it has actually become an extension of me. The Chinese word for computer, diannao, is better suited, as it literally translates to ‘electric brain’, and my laptop is just a part of my brain that is outside my body. Thanks to the time my little electric brain and I have spent together, Apple has effectively hooked me for life. I could put something like ‘once you go Mac you never go back!!!’ here, but it made me cringe, so I’ll just leave it at that.

The trouble with living in St Andrews and Scotland in general is that the only Mac store is based in Glasgow (ominous music).

I will admit that there are some nice bits of Glasgow, yes, but for the most part, it’s difficult not to kind of despise it. Obviously there are no direct trains from St Andrews, so the only other choice is a two and a half-hour coach that takes you on a tour of the heart of Fife, and as you go through the heart of Fife, the coach accumulates a lot of people who, frankly, you would rather not sit with in an enclosed space. One of my more recent rides on the X24 saw a herd of about twenty-five local women in their late thirties embark, absolutely wasted, at about ten am from the beautiful town of Glenrothes (a total lie. Glenrothes is an armpit, has always been an armpit, and will always be an armpit.). It was their friend’s fortieth birthday, apparently, and they had decided to celebrate by being tremendously irritating. Armed with balloons, plastic water bottles filled with booze and luridly coloured mixers, pungent cheesy snacks, bad dye jobs, and a lot of excess flesh, they proceeded to make life hell for the next two hours. The low point? Either when they all started singing ‘Single Ladies’ at the top of their drunk Fife voices or when a particularly robust one started to perform a striptease (a shudder just ripped through my body). That was a particularly bad journey, but even without a flock of drunken chavs, it’s long, it’s boring, and it’s made worse by the fact that you know, at the end, you’ll be deposited in Glasgow. I’ve done it a few too many times and appear to have developed some kind of visceral reaction to the thought of it.










I suspect these people are in fancy dress, but they should give you a good picture of the kind of thing one has to put up with on the ride to Glasgow

So there’s that, you know, the whole five-hour return trip through some of Scotland’s shittiest parts. Not technically the fault of the Apple store. The same goes for the people soliciting for charity who roam the length of Buchanan Street every weekend, the very ones that scare the hell out of me by approaching purposefully with a big Joker-esque smile and leave me shrieking excuses about ‘important appointment pleasepleaseplease get away from me’. The Mac people can’t do anything about them, I don’t think.

But! The sanctuary provided by the modern and spacious floorplan and the gentle whirring of Macs en masse is deceptive, because it turns out that the people working in the Glasgow Apple store are kind of incompetent. Actually, really incompetent. Nice enough, most of them, but if their jobs are to help people with their computer needs, then they are painfully bad at their jobs.

The laptop saga is long and generally uninteresting, but the basic issue was that my poor little Macbook had to have its logic board replaced (I think this is the thing with the ethernet port and all that—very important). After being quoted a price that made the blood drain from my face, I left my electric brain in the hands of the Glasgow staff for a week. After a long seven days I made the journey back to Buchanan Street, where it was presented to me all new-looking and shiny and happy and functional. I took it in my arms and promised to never leave it again. Forty-eight hours later, it convulsed and then died. Made nauseous at the thought of going back to Glasgow yet again, I had it examined by a guy down in Edinburgh on my way to the airport who pried it open and said, ‘Jesus fucking Christ’. Apparently the logic board had been put together shockingly badly. Like wires crossing things that they shouldn’t, screws that were the wrong size, things that were making the topcase bulge outward as though an alien were living under there. I put in a few calls to the Buchanan Street store, during which I listened to a lot of easy listening whilst on hold and was then promised that someone would call me back. Needless to say, that never happened, so I bundled up my electric brain, which had now become a very expensive, delicate and cumbersome paperweight, carried it through Sri Lanka, and vowed to avenge its pathetic death by booking an appointment at the Regent Street store in London upon my return to the UK.

After showering off the grime accumulated from a three-hour train ride through the tropics and twelve hours of flying, I bounded out into the sunshine streaming through all of London and made my way there. Compared to the torture of getting to Glasgow, it was so easy I could have wept. It seemed as through one minute, I was hopping on the tube at Sloane Square and the next, I was making my way up the trademark translucent aqua stairs towards technological salvation. I’m never living in the middle of nowhere again.

Unfortunately, instead of arriving at 3.40 for the appointment I had booked from the hot confines of a Sri Lankan internet café, I arrived at 4.40. My timezones had been well and clearly scrambled by the overnight journey and daylight savings time, and as the laid-back guy in the official blue shirt told me that, erm, actually, my appointment was for an hour ago, I wanted to kick myself. However, he immediately promised me that he would make space and that I would be seen anyway—something would never happen in Glasgow.

I waited for maybe twenty minutes when he came rushing back to sit down beside me, sympathising, ‘You’ve been waiting for ages, huh?’ Considering that I had been without a laptop for a month, twenty minutes hardly seemed that long, but I proceeded to tell him the whole unfortunate tale, including the fact that I was leaving London on Tuesday and would either need it done by then or shipped up to Scotland. As transit-induced exhaustion started to set in, there was a great deal of hand-wringing, eyes cast upward in despair, some tears that were definitely more real than strategic, and a plaintive ‘I just want my laptop back’ to conclude. Now thoroughly mortified at my inability to tell time and to not cry in front of the Mac employees, I was led over to another laid-back guy in a blue shirt.

I braced myself for the worst.

His nimble and technology-friendly fingers danced over the machine a bit, and after a minute or two he looked up and said, ‘We should be able to finish this within a day, probably. As long as we have the parts.’ He checked to see if they had the parts. They did. ‘Okay, so that’s that.’ This is going far, far too smoothly, I thought. Suspiciously so.

Warily, like a fawn approaching a mountain lion, I asked him if I would be charged the £400-plus I had been told a new logic board cost.













How I feel when I ask about the cost for computer repairs

‘No, of course not. It should be ready by the time you leave for your flight on Tuesday. If you want to speak to anyone, call this number. We’ll get it fixed, thank you very much, and have a nice day.’ And I was walking back out the doors, blinking into the sun that was beginning to set over Regent Street.

It was so easy! So incredibly, unfathomably easy! After I had spent the majority of four years living in an isolated and wind-blasted little Scottish town, and with Shanghai seeming a world away, I had forgotten how gloriously accessible everything is when you live in a proper city. As I slid the key into the lock of my aunt and uncle’s house, which has always provided a lovely temporary home when I’m in London, I thought of all the wonderful things that accompanied life in civilisation. Indonesian food. Nightlife past two. Supermarkets other than Tesco and clothing shops other than Jack Wills and H&M. And, of course, a massive Apple store filled with people that actually seem to know what they’re doing, right at my fingertips.

(Art, music, theatre, diversity—all that is good too.)

Why you may not get to have an opinion on the monarchy

In the entire month of February I have managed exactly one blog post and I have managed to post it on the last day of the month. I believe that this technically makes me bad at blogging. Thankfully I don’t rely on things like the blogosphere and Twitter for personal validation.

For those of you that have either been in a coma for the last few months or managed to avoid reading the newspaper, going on the internet, listening to the radio or hearing people’s voices when they talk to you, Prince William and his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton are getting married on the 29th of April. At this point, a Google search for ‘Prince William and Kate Middleton’ will garner approximately one kajillion results (I might have made that number up). The day, nay the moment, the engagement was announced, the entirety of Britain experienced an unprecedented Kate and Wills onslaught by every form of media, and somewhat alarmingly, it hasn’t stopped. I was in the gym at the time and heard it on Radio One when I was wiping down the elliptical trainer and had my earbuds out. Sweaty, wheezing a bit and full of endorphins, it didn’t fully hit me. But I try and make my way through about four papers a day (Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Financial Times) and by the time I finished my morning reads a few hours later, I knew more about these two people than I did about most of my first cousins.

Another little factoid for the coma victims and ignoramuses out there: Kate and Wills met and indeed starting dating at none other than the University of St Andrews, a few feet from where I’m sitting right now. Cue news vans descending upon our very staid little town for a scoop that doesn’t really exist and the university milking the event for all it’s worth.




































The future king and queen: they had to meet somewhere

Without contributing to the ever-expanding pile of royal wedding-related media drivel, I just want to mention something rather central to the topic: I don’t actually get to have an opinion about the Royal Family. No, no one is censoring me per se—I don’t live in Belarus or Saudi Arabia—but it is truly a situation of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t. The reason for this resides in the drawer of my bedside table next to my Nyquil stash: a fat little beat-up navy blue booklet featuring the stamps and visas bearing testament to my layovers in Amsterdam and my summer spent working in Shanghai. Yes, it is the passport issued to me from the government of United States of America. As an American, I simply don’t bother espousing an opinion on the monarchy, because no matter what I say, I will most likely be patronised, ridiculed, or just disregarded, and I don’t particularly enjoy any of those. I don’t even bother having an opinion, not even a little inconsequential one that I hold close, tell no one, and can ponder when I’m lying in bed just after I’ve turned off the light and before I start dreaming of axe murderers on tandem bikes chasing me around Lake Geneva.

From personal observation, it would seem that most Americans fall into one of two categories when it comes to the British Royal Fam.

Category A: ‘Democratic republicanism is the VERY BEST SYSTEM EVER, so if it’s not a democratic republic, it’s just wrong’.

The America with which the West is familiar can be boiled down to essentially three things. Number one is an ideological emphasis on liberalism that is so extreme I’m failing to come up with an adequate word to describe it. Number two is the fact that the United States, as a result of its post-World War II adoption of the superpower moniker, has been able to do pretty much whatever it wants—and get away with it!—for the better part of a century. Number three is an utter conviction in America’s moral righteousness thanks the Protestant nutjobs that were kicked out of Britain and founded the country in the first place. Mash all these together and you get a lot of people that believe democracy is unequivocally and unerringly the universally best system, and of course everyone wants democracy, and if you don’t yearn for democracy, you’re probably just unenlightened. Add to this conviction an old grudge about being taxed without representation and you can easily trace the origin of American resentment of the British monarchy. This opinion knows no political divisions; you see it in Americans of the jingoistic right-wing variety who cannot fathom that the ’merican way ain’t the best way and in Americans of the uber-politically correct left-wing variety who cannot fathom a people willingly living under the tyranny of a despot (even if that despot exercises no political power whatsoever).

You can’t deny that the American who jumps up and shouts, ‘My spidey sense is tingling! The liberal republican in me senses that this monarchy is just—not—RIGHT!’ is obnoxious and probably deserves a swat with a rolled-up newspaper. But voicing an opinion that carries a much less annoying and toned-down connotation of such thinking will elicit copious eye-rolling should the voicer be American, for the opinion will be dismissed as ‘knee-jerk American’. The modern-day British counterpart of Edward Said will snap, ‘Oh, you’ll never get it, because you’re not British. Americans really just don’t understand it’. The underlying message is that an American’s opinion is simultaneously not real and wrong…despite the fact that that makes no sense.

Category B: ‘I love the Royal Family! Europe and its little traditions are so cute! How can anyone dream of getting rid of the monarchy?’

Frankly, this is just irritating. Unless you’re talking about, I don’t know, gnomes, squealing over foreign things because they’re ‘cute’ reveals a person to be not merely an idiot but a condescending, uninformed and generally insensitive idiot. The European monarchies are institutions that have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years and are products of long-term cultural, religious and political trends—not a theme park attraction dreamt up for the purpose of entertaining New World tourists. Sadly, though (and annoyingly), it seems like quite a lot of Americans view the world as such.

However, if I were ever to come out with anything like the aforementioned statement (albeit something much more understated because I try and make it a point not to sound like a total moron), I would immediately be dismissed, scoffed at, you name it. That opinion, after all, would be simply irrelevant because it came from a naïve American who only thought that way because the idea of having a royal family is ‘novel’ and ‘quaint’. And our modern-day British counterpart of Edward Said would say something along the lines of ‘oh, you’ll never get it, because you’re not British. Americans really just don’t understand it’.

And…well…yeah. There are quite a lot of frighteningly uninformed and poorly read people from the US of A that don’t really seem to understand a lot of things. We get them in St Andrews, too; they’re the ones who spoil my Starbucks time by conducting a conversation at 900 decibels about how they couldn’t figure out how to take the train to ‘Edin-berggg’. Thanks to these twits and the numerous other twits that venture abroad without ever picking up a newspaper, Americans are all tarred with the same twitty brush, which means even the non-twits don’t get to have an opinion about the Royal Family.


To give you an idea of how a depressingly large number of Americans view the rest of the world, aka 'them'













There are a lot of people out there who don't seem to realise that Scotland, Northern Ireland etc exist at all and refer to the UK simply as 'England'

Which is why I remain completely and utterly ambivalent about the issue. If you want an opinion, ask me about Bill Clinton. I don’t care what was going on under his desk; what a champ of a president.

Oy vey

New Year was a bit difficult this year—difficult in the way that eating ten packets of saltine crackers without water in under a minute is difficult. For reasons unbeknownst to my older and somewhat wiser self, we used to undertake the Saltine Challenge in high school when we were bored, had had a class cancelled and had ready access to saltines. No one ever seemed to succeed; instead, whoever was making the attempt always ended up covered in crumbs and choking on the dry off-white lump in his or her throat in a somewhat non-dangerous way.















Just try eating ten packets of these babies in under a minute with no water. It's easier to eat human hair.



On the first of January, I woke up with that same oh-my-God-I’m-choking-because-cracker-paste-is-blocking-my-airway sensation—something I hadn’t experienced in years—and it wasn’t the result of a light-hearted and stupid saltine-eating contest; rather, it was the first day of 2011. There was an irrational but rather large part of me that thought 2011 would never come. That it would exist only on facebook as part of my network information (‘Cecile Babcock, University of St Andrews ’11’). That really, I had just started university, so it must be closer to 2007 than 2011. That 2011 was just a year from 2012, ie the London Olympics, the next American presidential election, and the Mayans’ predicted end of days. But no, I opened my eyes to a cold and soggy day in St Andrews (our sunny Middle Eastern family holiday had since ended) to find the entire world telling me it was 1 January 2011. I stifled the urge to yell FUCK! as I rolled out of bed and mentally prepared myself for the coming year.

Providing I don’t screw up catastrophically in the coming semester, 22 June 2011 marks my own personal end of St Andrews days, also known as graduation. By that point I am expected to turn into a ‘real person’ with a job, a tastefully furnished flat, and a general idea of what I am doing with my life. I have a tentative grasp of the last one—which means I know the general industry in which I’d like to work and that I’d like to make a tonne of money, though the geography of my life is still very much up in the air—leaving me with .5 out of 3 so far.

I’m not one of those people who is going to mourn the ‘student lifestyle’ whereby I only have four hours of class a week, can sleep in until noon and can get a pass from the rest of society for an indolent and slovenly lifestyle. For one, I’ve never been the sort to sleep until noon, which, during a Scottish winter, means you miss most of the daylight. But I also get antsy without a full schedule and find a Monday to Friday nine to five job very satisfying. Plus I love earning money; it’s like working out and getting endorphins that go straight into your bank account. It also must be said that yes, I am looking forward to leaving St Andrews for London, ie a place with more than three streets. I’m thrilled to be able to celebrate Chinese New Year, go to proper clubs, and shop somewhere other than New Look and Jack Wills. There is no doubt that I’ll miss St Andys, but the time has come to say, city life? Yes please.

So it’s not that I want to stay a student forever and ever or that I wish to spend the rest of my life ensconced in a small Scottish seaside town. Nor is it that I think I’ll fail or end up with some really heinous degree. I’m just a) a bit worried about landing a decent job in the midst of a global recession and b) not that great with change. There. I said it. I’m awful at change. I can’t even throw out a pair of old heels without a lot of mental preparation and deep breathing. My tendency towards borderline irrational nostalgia doesn’t help things, either.
















It's been fun, St Andrews...you good-looking town, you

It’s a weird time for all us in the winter of our St Andrews years. People have been graduating from university for millennia, and barring death or perpetual failure to hand in essays, the end is imminent. I could toss around the usual slew of clichéd adjectives—scared! excited! nervous! confused!—but I’ll stick with that not-altogether-dangerous choking sensation. I suppose the best way to deal with it is to quit eating saltines and drink a bit of water. Or a frappuccino or a Golden Cadillac, as the case may be.

Revenge is a dish best served cold (and wet)

This extremely delayed bloggage comes to you from the lobby of the Toledo Hotel in Amman, Jordan, where I am wearing sunglasses, flip flops and a kaffiyeh, but I’ll get to that later. All I’ll say for now is that it’s blissfully warm and sunny here and that the wizened owner of a nut shop gave me a sizeable bag of almonds for free…along with his name (Abdullah) and phone number. Thanks but no thanks.

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?

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.

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

Last Thursday I went down to Durham for the night to attend a Bain & Company recruitment presentation, as working for Bain would pretty much be my dream job. Why they choose to hold an event at Durham and not at St Andrews I will never understand, but it did give me a chance to get out of the bubble, albeit briefly.

In spite of the vast majority of my train travel in the UK, it’s one of my favourite ways to get around. At the moment, I’m en route to Durham for the night—just a hop, skip and a jump down the east coast—and while I may have the mild urge to drop kick the pair of squalling Scottish children seated in front of me, the two that keep screeching ‘ticket, please!’ like they’re Mohammed receiving the f***ing Koran, I am for the most part enjoying watching autumnal Britain go past.

Part of this no doubt comes from being raised in California, a state whose expanse remains very much umarked by reliable passenger trains. If you want to get from San Francisco to LA, you have two options: fly or drive. If you want to get from San Francisco to pretty much anywhere else, your options are narrowed to driving. For the past twenty years, the mythical high-speed rail link between the two major cities has been debated, put on the ballot, and abandoned in a cycle that repeats itself over and over with absolutely no results (I haven’t been in California for four months now, though, and I’ve done a poor job of keeping up with the state politics—apart from Proposition 19 in the upcoming election—so I’m not sure what’s going on right now).
There is the much-hyped Coast Starlight Express, but I’ve never known anyone apart from tourists to take it because it’s usually delayed by about nineteen hours (not even an exaggeration; the freight trains have priority over the passenger trains or something like that). Hardly an efficient way to go from Norcal to Socal. It’s also possible to get the train up to Tahoe—the tracks run alongside Highway 80, carved so that they cling to the rugged sides of mountains and then laid to run through the meadow directly beneath the Sugar Bowl gondola—but again, it’s wildly inefficient, and the only people I’ve ever known to take it were my mom and brother back in the early nineties, when Ted was going through the same ‘train stage’ as every other little boy (unless they’re going through a dinosaur, airplane, car or other heavy machinery phase). I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve wished there were a fast, direct ski train to Tahoe, the sort in those vintage posters from the 1920s (probably the best time to have been white and rich, in my opinion).

So I can recall pressing my face against train windows to look out at the Highlands, and twining through the fields of Tuscany on a slow train when Italy still used the lira, and being whipped past the vineyards outside of Bordeaux by the TGV. But, as for most Californians, trains do not feature very prominently in my childhood memories, and I came to associate them not just with going on holiday, but with a sort of comforting old world quaintness. Hence my fondness for them, quite apart from the fact that I just like going places. The journey up to St Andrews is particularly nice, as you get to go by the sea, across the oft-photographed Firth of Forth, through lots of picturesque bucolic fields, so on and so forth.

That’s not to say, however, that there haven’t been moments in my three-odd years of residence in Britain that have seriously tested my patience with the whole thing. Moments where I’ve wanted to tear up all of my little orange and white tickets and shout, ‘Forget the whole thing! I’ll take a taxi! I’ll hitchhike! I’ll crawl!’ Moments where the urge to drop kick noisy children in my carriage has been, shall we say, somewhat greater than ‘mild’. We’ve all experienced more than our share of delays, fat chavvy seatmates, broken heating, and dickish attendants, of course, but my journey back up to Leuchars from Sheffield last April was a veritable comedy of errors.

I wasn’t of the fittest of states to begin with, as I’d just come back from India a few days ago and was still recovering from a vicious bout of food poisoning that had left me weakened and bony (thanks to the disgusting-sounding shigella, I later found out). Plus I was still adjusting back to the brisk and chilling British climate after a fortnight of gloriously roastingly hot 40-degree sunshine in Rajasthan and was suffering from the cold even more so than usual. So I was content to let a man in an overcoat heave my backpack to the top shelf of the luggage rack and curl up in my coat for a nap until we reached Edinburgh. All was going to plan when, just south of Newcastle, the train began to slow ominously—the carriage held its collective breath—and then, to everyone’s acute despair, shuddered to a halt. We had sat there for about twenty minutes, rock-still, when the intercom came to life and the conductor told us, with fatigue in his voice, that the train had stopped. After delivering that earth-shattering piece of news, he said that the train had stopped due to ‘an unfortunate situation’. Again, absolutely shocking. Finally, we were told that we would have more information in a bit, and the utterly pointless announcement was over.
A few minutes later, the conductor told the passengers that we were stopped because not one but two people had thrown themselves in front of speeding trains just north of Newcastle. I don’t mean to be nasty here, but if I lived just north of Newcastle, I would probably be inclined to do the same.* Still, I have very little patience for people that choose to end it by standing in front of trains. I find it tremendously selfish—it’s terrible to be that depressed, of course, but why do they feel the need to ruin everyone else’s day in addition to their own? Apparently these two twits had buggered up the rail lines all over the northeast. Plus, I had no water left, which made my tongue feel like sandpaper, and the restaurant car had decided it couldn’t be bothered to sell things anymore. So I was ready to get home.

The train crawled into the Newcastle station, where we were meant to wait until the mess got sorted out. It would be at least an hour, the conductor informed us. I wouldn’t make my train from Edinburgh to Leuchars at this point, but it didn’t particularly worry me as I could just get the later one. But the hour came and went, and ninety minutes later, I was not only doubting that I would be able to make it home that night, I was dying of thirst. At this point the conductor came on the intercom again and gravely informed us that it would be at least another hour. Groans all around.

A crowd of people streamed out the carriage, myself amongst them and now slightly mad with thirst. I crossed over the tracks to the only shops that were still open—it was about half ten by this point—bought my water, cracked open the bottle and started guzzling right there. Feeling a bit better, I began to make my way back to the other platform. I was just ascending the stairs when my train made that funny puffing sound, came to life and began to pull out of the station.

There are few feelings worse than the one that comes over you as you watch your train leave without you. First off, you’re utterly powerless, unless you’re some kind of superhuman and sprint behind the thing, leap into the air and grab onto the outside of the carriage (not in the cards for yours truly). Second, you’re stranded in a place you don’t exactly want to be, with, as of now, no means of getting to the place you do want to be. To make matters worse, my backpack was still safely tucked away, right where the overcoat-wearing man had put it, and that particular train wasn’t terminating at Edinburgh. No, its final destination was Glasgow. Things didn’t look good for either me or the backpack, which would probably end up in the hands of some Weegie chav who would rifle through the thin, brightly coloured tunics and tiny marble elephant figurines, all coated with the ubiquitous layer of Indian dust, and wonder why he had stolen something so useless.

So, immobilised by shock and the nausea-inducing wave of dread that rolled over me, I watched my ride home and my luggage continue on their way north, the distance between us increasing with every chug. When it had disappeared from view, my legs came back to life and I went to find the nearest person who could help me sort out my rather crappy situation, a string of expletives running through my head. I found a very put out-looking man who resembled a large egg that someone had outfitted in an East Coast jacket for a laugh and spilled my story—the thirst! the multiple suicides! the one-hour delay that never happened! the backpack!—in one great rush and capped it all off by squeaking out a sufficiently pathetic ‘please, sir, what should I do?’

‘Jesus, there are like, six of you that did this,’ he grumbled. ‘Don’t you know you should never get off the train?’

Well, now I did.

The egg-shaped man spoke into his radio a few times. ‘Wait here,’ he instructed. I obeyed, rubbing my arms to try and keep warm and shifting my weight from foot to foot for the next twenty minutes. Egg Man returned just as a train rolled into the station and told me, ‘Just get on that one!’

‘Is it going to Edinburgh?’ I asked, no doubt sounding like a moron. I didn’t care, though; the last thing I wanted was to end up in Carlisle or something.

‘Yes! Yes! Just get on it! Quickly!’ he shouted, all but bodily shoving me towards it.

‘Erm, what about my luggage?’ I called after the man as he departed to have a fag.

‘You’ll have to ask once you get on that train,’ he yelled over his shoulder. And so I stopped asking questions and hopped onto the very empty and silent train that was supposedly going to Edinburgh.

For the next fifteen minutes, I wobbled my way up and down the length of the train like an unsteady foal, searching for someone—anyone—who appeared to work for the rail company and providing much amusement for all the seated passengers. Eventually I gave up and curled up on a pair of empty seats, wondering if I would have to pay for another ticket, how I would get back to St Andrews, if I would get back to St Andrews (as, at this rate, I would arrive in Edinburgh well past midnight), and when/if I would ever see that backpack again. I was mentally preparing myself to spend the night in Waverly Station—it would be cold, but I always carry a decent supply of sleeping pills in my handbag—when an attendant miraculously appeared. I scrambled up out of my seat and once again relayed my pathetic situation to this slightly less egg-shaped man.

The response was the same—I was an idiot for getting off the train, as were those five other people—but I was reassured that I would not have to buy a new ticket, my luggage would be offloaded and waiting for me, I would be sent up to St Andrews in a taxi, and no, I would not have to sleep on the floor of the station. My knees went weak with relief. By two am, I was soundly asleep under my goose-feather duvet back in St Andrews, clad in my mom’s old Berkeley jumper and no doubt dreaming of pleasant things like skiing and Starbucks frappuccinos.

And that is how I managed to get a taxi ride from Edinburgh straight to my front door and pay absolutely nothing for the privilege. I could have done without the near-coronary, though.

*I was typing this just before my train pulled into Newcastle and noticed the lady sitting next to me peer over my shoulder. She of course ended up disembarking at Newcastle and made sure to hit me with her handbag on the way out. I think I might have offended her.

Return to Fife

Well, it’s been over two weeks since I made my way back from the bustling metropolis of Shanghai to the breezy seaside town of St Andrews, and I can say with confidence that reverse culture shock is a very real thing. Not that I didn’t know it before, but Shanghai and St Andys really are polar opposites in most every way.

-You all knew this was coming, but I do have to put in a bit about the weather. When I got off the plane in Edinburgh, and for about three days afterward, my body was racked by a chill that went so deep I simply could not get rid of it. The jeans, cardigans, socks and boots that would have been stifling back in Shanghai did nothing to shelter me from the dampness seeping into my skin or the wind pressing on my body. It hasn’t been that cold—around 13 degrees, or 55 Fahrenheit—but being thrust into it immediately after my gloriously sweltering summer amplified the effect. I’ve managed to adjust, I think, helped in part by the storage company delivering my boxes of winter clothing and my reunion with my Uggs. People have pointed out to me that it’s only the first week of October, though, and I’m already bundling myself in my warmest sheepskin coat. So there is probably still a risk I won’t survive the winter.

-One thing to which I haven’t managed to adjust is the painful lack of any kind of decent East Asian cuisine here. St Andrews has its fair share of restaurants—Hugh Grant has to eat somewhere when he comes up for the golf—but Chinese? Forget it. Malaysian, Burmese, Sumatran? REALLY forget it. Last night I was on the phone to my mother literally in tears because I felt too ill to leave my room and all I really wanted was a bowl of Xinjiang-style kuan mian (thick noodles), which I could have been enjoying for a mere 7rmb in five minutes’ time were I still in Shanghai. Needless to say, there is no kuan mian to be had in our little town, and certainly not for the equivalent of 70p. Oh, food of Shanghai, how I pine for you.

-If I had run into someone I knew randomly on the street in Shanghai, I would be shocked. In a massive city of sixteen million people, the chances aren’t terribly high. Here things are quite the opposite. The walk to Tesco, for example, takes eight minutes (yes, I’ve timed it). When I tried to walk to Tesco the other day, it literally took half an hour because I kept running into people and having conversations. It’s been one of my favourite parts of small town life, really, and I will miss it when I leave. There are downsides, though: it can take a ridiculous amount of time to walk short distances, leaving the house on a ‘low maintenance day’ is pretty much unacceptable, and you always seem to run into the people you least want to see—either at that particular moment, or just in general.

-St Andrews is notorious for this, but holy Christ, I’ve blitzed through a shocking amount of money in the past fortnight. When I remember the time I thought 38rmb was a lot to pay for a taxi ride, I weep a little bit.

-Free champagne at 100 Century Avenue or the Apartment is a distant memory now. If a pub in this town had ladies’ nights, the results would be somewhat disastrous in that the streets would be littered with girls rendered paralytic from free booze and the pub itself would go broke with shocking speed. I have stubbornly refused to buy any drinks so far, preferring to get my kicks during pregaming (sadly). I also miss the wonderfully laughable assortment of pick up lines I would get in Shanghai, ranging from the clichéd (‘so what do you do here; are you a model?’) to the bizarre (‘do you play for the Australian beach volleyball team?’) to the direct (‘my associates and I would like you to come drink champagne with us on our sofa’) to the simultaneously hilarious and alarmingly inappropriate (‘I want to $%&# you @%$#&# on this dancefloor’). A girl hears a memorable pickup line in St Andrews only on occasion, owing to the diminutive size of the town and the degree to which everyone’s social circles overlap. That is to say, if you make a tit of yourself trying to chat someone up, most of your friends (and their friends) will hear about it within the hour.

-Needless to say, I don’t get people coming up on the street asking if they can take my picture, blowing kisses, mistaking me for a celebrity or offering free cigarettes or flasks of green tea and vodka. If I walked down the street and people started staring like they do in China, I would start to worry that, I don’t know, I had a hole in the bum of my trousers or had had someone draw something rude on my forehead in the middle of the night. Considering that rural Fife is one of the least diverse places on earth, being white will not garner you any special attention here.

-When I speak in English, passersby understand what I’m saying. This means no more making fun of the taxi driver on a night out, which yes, I’ll admit we tended to do back in Shanghai if he did something particularly amusing, stupid or both (‘Why does he keep giggling unnervingly; do you think he’s stoned?’ ‘I think so; he’s been going in circles and singing “Hit Me Baby One More Time”’). If I tried that in the back of a Scottish taxi, I would probably get beaten up, or at the very least chucked out of the car and told to learn some manners. See, it’s the little things you miss.

However, I have found one thing that St Andys and the ’hai have in common: in both places, you will see genuinely weird things happening in public on a regular basis. It’s the same thing I’ve found in San Francisco, the unofficial world hub of weirdness, and you’ll see it in Amsterdam in New York as well. The other day, for example, when Natasha and I were camped out in Starbucks rehashing the events of the night before, a parade of people in period costume marched down the street, their leader hoisting a 10 foot-high lance into the air. As the line snaked on, we realised that these weren’t just large ugly girls in mediaeval garb; no, it appeared to be a procession of men in drag. They then proceeded to walk up and down Market Street for the next half hour or so and crossed in front of Starbucks no less than four times. No one knew exactly what they were doing and no one seemed to care all that much. Really, the sight of the mediaeval drag queens was comfortingly similar to the man walking backward down Xinzha Lu singing ‘Poker Face’ to himself, or the Rastafarian who once ran in front of my friend’s car in San Francisco, and when she screeched to a halt, banged his fist on the bonnet and yelled, ‘You ugly, bitch!’ I can’t even imagine the reverse culture shock had I gone back to somewhere…normal.