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.

[statement expressing surprise and bemusement at the stringency of Israeli security here]

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Heathen Christmas '10

Sitting in the sun in Tel Aviv, I can confirm that travel in Jordan and Israel has really agreed with me. Between the sun, the fresh produce, the magnificent ruins, and that wonderful thing the Dead Sea mud does to your skin that makes it feel deliciously smooth, I have been a very happy girl for the past fortnight—especially when I hear about the highs of -1 in the UK or the rain apparently bucketing down in Marin.

But I can’t help thinking that there’s something ever so slightly ironic about three very secular people travelling to the Holy Land for Christmas, of all places at all times. You could probably find tree stumps that are more religious than I, yet here I am in the heart of Abrahamic spirituality, somewhat guiltily. Walking through the Old City of Jerusalem, you can practically feel the piety radiating off the Franciscan monks, nuns and ultra-Orthodox Jews. And I can’t help but be a tiny bit fearful that passersby will take one look at me and immediately know that I’m a heathen and chase me all the way out to Jaffa Gate with a flaming torch…or more realistically, shake their heads and tsk-tsk.

It all began a few months ago when I became aware of the fact that, when speaking to people who I knew to be religious—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Sufi, whatever…though to be fair I don’t actually know any Druze or Sufi—I would go out of my way not to mention my family’s Christmas plans. I had this horrible image of letting slip that I would be in Jerusalem on Jesus’s birthday and some deeply Christian person looking at me, widening their eyes, and hissing, ‘Unbelievers have no place there!’ It’s ridiculous, I know, and you can call me paranoid, but we atheists do take a lot of crap. (I believe that George Bush, Sr once had the audacity to say that atheists weren’t real American citizens because the US is meant to be ‘one nation under God’. I was only twelve when I heard about that gem but I remember being royally pissed off.)

Refreshingly, in Jordan no one really seemed to give that much of a crap about religion or lack thereof. The north, especially, is full of biblical sights—places like Mt Nebo, where Moses looked upon the Holy Land, and Bethany-Beyond-the-Jordan, where John the Baptist was born. But, all things considered, they’re presented with a minimum of hullabaloo. You’ve got your informational signs explaining what supposedly happened in these places, so straightforward as to be funny, and maybe two or three tourists murmuring something along the lines of ‘that’s nice/interesting/pleasant/[positive but bland adjective]’. Then there are places like Madaba, (a market town outside of Amman that was our first port of call), which is sixty-something per cent Christian, but all that really meant was that the town council had whacked up a Christmas tree on the central roundabout. As far as I know, nobody has thrown eggs at it or tried to kick it down or anything—everyone seemed pretty laid-back. Moreover, every time The Question of Faith came up in conversation with Jordanians we met, whether they were Muslim, Christian, or something else, the response from my mom, brother or me that we ‘erm…aren’t really anything’ was met with little more than a shrug. Although you’re more than likely to get woken up by the muzzein’s call to prayer at an unsociable hour of the morning, Jordan is hardly what you would call a religious country. If you’re looking for one of those, try Saudi.

It was the same story when we crossed the Israeli border into in Eilat, a Red Sea port city at the southern tip of the Negev; in Eilat, the only things people seem to worship are the year-round sun and terrible but curiously appealing techno. After my mom and brother made perfunctory comments on how all the signs were now in a different non-Roman script, the three of us heaved our luggage aboard an Egged bus bound for Jerusalem and spent the next half hour or so wondering at how exactly one is meant to pronounce Egged. Is it like the past tense of the verb ‘to egg’, as in ‘I hate my neighbour so I egged his house’? Does it rhyme with the ‘legged’ in ‘three-legged dog’? Does the emphasis fall on the last syllable, ie Eg-GED? Anyway, after a while we all shut up and settled back for our five-hour journey.

As we made our way past Be’er Sheva, I noticed that the land started looking a lot more…biblical (for lack of a better word). The southern half of Israel is a dramatic mountainous desert that is best described as unforgiving; in other words, exactly the sort of place one can envision an old bearded man leading his increasingly grumpy peoples back in the day. And of course a good number of the places mentioned in the Bible and Old Testament lie within this area. We started passing brown signs pointing the way to Mt Sodom and Lot’s cave, not to mention Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron and oh, right, Jerusalem. There might as well have been a sign that read, ‘WELCOME TO BIBLE COUNTRY!’ But real Bible Country! Different from, say, Oklahoma. Even as a secular person, seeing those place names was mind-blowing simply because they’re central to the cultural foundations of the Western world. Everyone knows them and has at least a vague idea of each one’s significance…though I’ll admit I’ve forgotten what exactly went down in Hebron with regards to biblical history.

Jerusalem itself is, in many ways, a city unlike any other simply because it is so very sacred to the world’s major monotheistic faiths, and on Christmas Day, the Christians are really and truly out in force. Not just local Christian Jerusalemites (is that right?) either—countless pilgrims from all corners of the earth descend upon the Holy Land for the holidays. In a great show of naivety, our family of secular humanists ventured into the Christian Quarter of the Old City on the 25th so we could look upon the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (built over Golgotha, where Jesus was supposedly crucified) and the Via Dolorosa (Jesus’s last very painful walk). We arrived at the church to find a veritable mob of tour groups, nuns and religious wackjobs all jostling each other and screaming at the top of their lungs. So many candles were being lit that men in long black robes (monks? friars? some other kind of special church employee?) had to bustle in and sweep away the burnt wicks and hardened wax droppings every few minutes. The church itself is quite interesting, as it’s developed into a simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent patchwork of Armenian, Coptic, Syrian and Greek Orthodox influences, but I personally found the whole mass migration thing more intriguing. It made me think—imagine if you could harness the will, the devotion, the determination, the conviction of all those Christians who had made the effort to be in the Holy Land for a 2000-year-old political dissident’s birthday! The potential for that kind of thing sort of makes me want my own religious following, but I won’t get into that now.

Oddly enough, though, I couldn’t help but feel a bit left out. It was as though everyone knew some massive wonderful secret and I didn’t. Like they had all received invites to a fabulous party that I had happened to stumble across without the faintest idea of what was going on. I didn’t grow up under a roc—I know what Christianity is, of course—but I couldn’t actually believe in it no matter how hard I tried, which I think is a pretty crucial part of the whole religion thing. And because it is a place that is so steeped in holiness, I’m inclined to think that my visit to Jerusalem is, in a way, much less significant to me than it is for Christians, Jews or Muslims. As an historian and as someone who is generally interested in humans, Jerusalem is fascinating, but I imagine that religious pilgrims’ experiences are infused with a kind of meaning I will never understand as an atheist.

(Before you start feeling sorry for me, I’m fine with it. Seriously, I am. I’m more than perfectly happy to eat pork, keep my head uncovered and spend my Sunday mornings drinking coffee and reading the paper, thanks very much.)

One of the other funny things about Jerusalem is that it is precisely where ‘the conflict’ to which we all refer when talking about the Israel-Palestine ‘situation’—that whole Judeo-Christian vs Muslim East-West Orientalist thing—comes to a head. East Jerusalem, which refers to the bit east of Route 1 (ie the pre-1967 frontier), is Muslim. West Jerusalem is unequivocally Jewish, particularly in ultra-Orthodox Mea Sharim. It is a city full of very different people living practically on top of one another, and if you let your mind wander, you can cross from one Jerusalem to another in the blink of an eye. So my secular family and I wove our way out of the Christmas crowds towards Damascus gate and into an ambient hole in the wall that served fresh hummus and falafel. Through the doorway I could glimpse the Christian pilgrims streaming by on their way out of the Old City, their faces portraits of a kind of awe I doubt I’ll ever experience or understand.

The wonders of vitamin D

That's the vitamin you get from being in the sun. Some absurdly high percentage of people living in Scotland suffer from a deficiency.

As a hot weather fiend living in the north, I consider the winter solstice immensely important, and not in an eclectic druid way. Personally, I'm thrilled it's past. For what feels like forever (technically six months), I have watched the daylight around me dwindle to those pathetic few hours it takes for the sun to bob above the horizon and tuck itself away again. The UV-simulating lamp perched on my desk does its best, and if I’m really desperate, I’ll crank up the heat and put on a bikini. Nevertheless it’s impossible to escape the fact that, in winter St Andrews, one lives in the dark like one of those proverbial giant alligators that roams the sewers beneath Manhattan, and that, my friends, is immensely depressing.

But that winteriness is festive! It’s part of the Christmas season! Things just wouldn’t be RIGHT without that icy darkness! everyone insists. To which I say, shut up (and no, I’m not one of those people who hates Christmas to ‘be different’).

Despite the lack of pine garlands or plastic reindeer or creepy fat men dressed in Santa suits, I’m pretty convinced that I’m in one of the more perfect spots on earth right now, for I am typing this from a massive egg-shaped chair with a view of Israel and the Sinai peninsula across the Red Sea. There are of course Christians in Jordan, but the majority is Sunni Muslim, so the manifestations of Christmas cheer that every British or American shop vomits all over you the moment you enter are for the most part absent. The market town of Madaba, our first port of call upon arriving in Amman eight days ago, has enough Christians to put up a tree in the main roundabout, but no one seems determined to asphyxiate you with festiveness. When I explained to a shopkeeper that we were heading to Jerusalem on the 24th for Christmas, he paused for a second and commented, ‘Huh. That’s right, I guess it is Christmas’. Again, I don’t hate the holiday—far from it; I love roast goose and Baileys and the Nutcracker and all the rest of it—but there are few things that ride me more than people forcing me to be cheerful. Here in Jordan, the nonchalant attitude is almost as refreshing as the sun and fresh dry air.

Indeed, the past eight days have reminded me what it is like to feel warmth on my skin and to see the sun overhead in a wide-open blue sky; much to my joy I feel human again. As I made my way into central Aqaba this morning, I was all of a sudden aware that I was smiling in that rather absent way that usually makes an appearance only after a few glasses of wine (and I assure you that my time in Jordan has been far from a boozefest). The iced-over island of Britain seems about a billion miles from the soft warm breezes and bubbling hookahs of Aqaba. To those of you that have been stranded by the snow back home, be it in your houses or in airports, I am so tremendously sorry. The whole thing just seems very unfair, and had I not skipped my last history seminar (oops) I would probably be in the same boat. Or the same terminal at Heathrow, if you will.

Though there is a rather large part of me that is praying for Schipol and/or Edinburgh to be hit by an enormous horrific snowstorm on the 30th, leaving me no choice but to—oh no!—stay in Amsterdam or Tel Aviv for a few days at KLM’s expense. One can dream.

Apart from the stellar weather it enjoys in December, Jordan has been exceedingly pleasurable because almost all of the Jordanians with whom I’ve interacted have been friendly to the point of absurdity. I know that this suggests a sweeping generalisation and that there’s usually been a cash transaction involved, but people are so ridiculously hospitable here that it blows my mind. It seems as though Lonely Planet and Rough Guide wax poetic about ‘the people’ of every single country/city/region guide they produce (‘…however, it is the people of Ghana/Thailand/Tajikistan/the Maghreb/the Moldovan breakaway republic of Transnistria that are its best asset’), but it is hard to exaggerate the kindness and effervescence of Jordanians. I attribute this to good weather, good food, and possibly the relaxing effects of a good hookah session (very scientific, I know). I’ve been served countless cups of free tea and Turkish coffee, gifted about ten pounds’ worth of sticky Arab sweets, and complimented for my extremely limited Arabic language skills, amongst other things. Even the airport employees issuing visas and stamping passports were unfailingly polite and—gasp!—friendly, whereas whenever I go through customs at SFO, I’m booted into the baggage claim with a flat, sarcastic ‘welcome home, I guess’.

Actually, here in Aqaba, a guy named Zalif seems to have taken it upon himself to make my stay as relaxing as possible (he works for the hotel; he’s not just some random). It began yesterday, when we arrived a few hours before check-in so that Ted could fit in a dive. We had all left Wadi Musa at half six in the morning, which meant that my mom and I were practically gagging for caffeine. Although we technically shouldn’t have gotten any breakfast, I asked Zalif, who was surveying the buffet, if we might possibly get some coffee, preferably the Turkish variety that Jordan does so well. My mom, brother and I were immediately seated with a view of the Red Sea and given our own pot of coffee, as well as hot milk, sugar and some sweet cakey bread. Later that afternoon, as I walked out to the beach for a much-needed bit of tanning, Zalif appeared out of nowhere with a cushion and turned my chaise so that I could enjoy the sun without being bothered by the sea breeze. ‘That was nice,’ I thought to myself, and had closed my eyes for all of about two minutes when he turned up with a plate of sliced oranges and a query as to whether or not I desired any lunch (already stuffed with fresh pita, hummus and cucumber, I declined). Since then, he has plied me with enough Turkish coffee to give me heart palpitations, which is great and everything, don’t get me wrong, but he’s also asked for a few pictures of the two of us waltzing together. That strikes me as weird, so I’ve foregone the free coffee for this afternoon.

There has of course also been Petra and the Roman city of Jerash and the crusader castles and the Dead Sea and all of that (I figure I’m obliged to mention these things in a post about Jordan). Photos hardly do these things justice; nonetheless they do a much, much better job describing them than my blog can. Or maybe I’m just in the mood for a puff on the hookah right now.

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.