The weekend in St Andrews
(I almost wrote week-end. Whence comes such folly!)
I was in St Andrews last weekend, visiting my girlfriend who was handing in her M.Phil., another friend who was sitting the viva for her own M.Phil. (she passed!), and of course all my good friends whom I missed dearly having not seen them in fully three weeks.
I hardly left Taste for the four or five days I was in town, and took over a shift for a few hours at one point, in my otherwise being without aim, and felt a right magician, making wonderful coffees (though I say so myself) and bringing lovely little flowers and occasionally onions out of the latte milk. There not being any decent coffee in Southampton, I haven't had any. Evidently I've subconsciously substituted it with tea, of which I've drunk scores of cups since arriving.
I am occasionally, and especially this last year, relatively hostile toward St Andrews, with its lack of a music community, its monasterial isolation, its privilege, its almost totally student demographic make-up; but it is, I have to concede, a hell of a place, with a great concentration of driven, seriously clued-in and yet also lovely people.
I was in St Andrews last weekend, visiting my girlfriend who was handing in her M.Phil., another friend who was sitting the viva for her own M.Phil. (she passed!), and of course all my good friends whom I missed dearly having not seen them in fully three weeks.
I hardly left Taste for the four or five days I was in town, and took over a shift for a few hours at one point, in my otherwise being without aim, and felt a right magician, making wonderful coffees (though I say so myself) and bringing lovely little flowers and occasionally onions out of the latte milk. There not being any decent coffee in Southampton, I haven't had any. Evidently I've subconsciously substituted it with tea, of which I've drunk scores of cups since arriving.
I am occasionally, and especially this last year, relatively hostile toward St Andrews, with its lack of a music community, its monasterial isolation, its privilege, its almost totally student demographic make-up; but it is, I have to concede, a hell of a place, with a great concentration of driven, seriously clued-in and yet also lovely people.