You're Not A Big Deal

St Andrews is a small town of few students and great fame. Its student body has, as a fellow writer at The Saint noted last week, perhaps the highest ratio of privately educated people at any UK university. It’s ranked highly in its group for teaching, and last year it vied heavily for students with Oxbridge. It’s extraordinary in a number of ways, but perhaps what makes it stand out most of all is its long list of pompous and pretentious societies, clubs, and collectives.

Take the fashion shows: Starfields is the biggest (and worst) event of the Martinmas semester — the music was noisy and the drinks bar required 45 sobering minutes of queueing. This is a small town. Everyone knows everyone. Yet somehow, the sartorial ceremony of donning a DONT WALK or FS puffer jacket bought for an ungodly sum commands huge respect. Remember what Macbeth said: “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” Look how it ended for him.

I remember when one faux fashionista of this crowd was compelled to ban a fellow student from his beloved DONT WALK for asking at his own birthday party “Who the f*** are you?” DONT WALK’s existence is why we cannot walk away from the social injustices and problems of the world. Why it doesn’t want to deal with the glaring problem of its ticket price is beyond me. Charity begins at home. Are you not a charity? The majority of the fashion show charlatans would be better off dressing salads than models.

Charities are common here and many different balls are put on throughout the year with varying degrees of quality, but there is one thing which doesn’t change: the sea of various ties. Some are easily recognisable from the others, some more bacchic than others, but all clearly dress their owners in the cloak of superiority. They pride themselves on their secrecy but jump back shocked when you say you’ve never heard of them — at Opening Ball, hosted by the esteemed Kate Kennedy Club, this is always particularly prevalent. KK: one bad ball; one good one; a massive traffic inconvenience; and one K away from a PR nightmare.

Next is the contingent of ever-present, ever-working library dwellers. I, myself, prefer the comfort of my home to watching the prison of pale, lifeless carcasses work tirelessly on internship applications. I wouldn’t bother if I were you — you’re better off strapping your CV to a rock and launching it through BlackRock’s window. Perhaps they’ll let you in for the irony of it. And if mummy and daddy are lucky enough to give you an internship, don’t bleat on about it — we all know how it works in New York.

Perhaps the worst of the bunch however are the intellectual snobs that creep around the streets, never seen, never known or recognised (in their own time) for their intellectual superiority and massive IQ. The subject matter of these cliques is lightweight at best. I know we are all students and we have to start somewhere, but please take yourself a little less seriously. Climb down from the rickety-rackety pedestal you erected for yourself. We don’t even know who you are. I believe there is a set of rigorous rounds of thorough interrogation, but I can’t comment. I failed at the application process.

For my part, I am currently writing this article at my kitchen table in my pants — a pseudo-journalist, a pseudo-pseudo-journalist. I do not write terribly well, nor terribly interestingly. The problem we all have is that we are all students and none of us really knows anything about anything. Though perhaps not the most encouraging thing a student could hear, my hope is that the bludgeoning is softer when distributed from someone in the same position.

I would like to ask everyone in this town to take life a little less seriously. Have a beer. Relax. You aren’t going to change the world today or tomorrow. We’re not that important, not really.

Image from Wikimedia Commons