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Lorn Macintyre
Photograph by the author
It’s the kind of plot that would have appealed to John Cheever, eloquent American chronicler. A gentleman driving his roadster to St Andrews last Sabbath morning for a romantic assignation realises that he had forgotten to shave, but there isn’t a can of pressurised foam to be purchased in the ‘auld grey toon’, in sunshine for once.
He wonders if there has been a hormonal aberration in St Andrews, and that females have developed excessive bodily hair. He has his answer as he drives along the Scores, almost knocking down the male streaker emerging from the principal’s mansion. It was a blessing she was not in residence, otherwise it would have given a contemporary meaning to rising to the crowing creature greeting the morn.
It’s Raisin Weekend. This custom is believed to be traceable back to the earliest days of Scotland’s oldest – and most stylish – university especially since the residency of William and Kate. Third or fourth year students volunteer to act as ‘parents’ to interested first year students (known as bejants and bejantines), introducing their ‘children’ to academic and social life in St Andrews.
First year students traditionally presented their ‘parents’ with a bottle of wine (formerly a pound of raisins) for which they received a receipt in Latin. In the late Victorian age of tightly-laced corsets, mortar boards, whiskers and watch-chains on waistcoats, with women newly permitted to study at St Andrews, it was a charming custom.
My wife and I emerge from mass on Raisin Sunday morning, spiritually fortified. The male streaker has scampered like the proverbial metal monkey along the chilly Scores, but on Market Street a couple, well lubricated at noon, are lying on the pavement, as if preparing to remake the movie ‘Deep Throat’ outside Tesco. There is a well-known and dangerous competition about the maximum number of persons that can be accommodated in a Mini.
A tiny tent has been erected on the Market Street pavement and already it contains two females, one of whom is having considerable difficulty accommodating her left buttock. The supermarket shelves are being swept of alcohol, though no student is legless enough to risk a fine for consuming booze on the street, with two female police officers keeping a canny eye on unsteady cross-dressers with painted faces pouring from closes and wynds.
On Monday morning there are barriers, police, and university officials with earpieces and anxious faces round St Salvator’s Quad. My friend Peter Adamson, the superb photographer with whom I have had the honour of collaborating on two best-selling illustrated books on St Andrews and the East Neuk, is there with his camera. At 11am the barriers are lifted aside, and within minutes there are several hundred students on the green sward. Your elderly chronicler moves forward with his dinky digital, to get a close-up shot. A female who looks as if her only apparel is shaving foam staggers against me, leaving the imprint of her figure on the back of my black jacket. ‘Rub it off with a wet cloth!’ she calls in a Tennessee drawl before beginning a vicious assault of a male with her pressurised can. But somehow the foam outline of the curvaceous Southern belle on my stooped spine is an emblem of my courage, and I leave it to be washed away by the first shower.
Study the accompanying photograph, which was taken at some risk of a fracture for your edification. As it approaches its 600th anniversary, there may well be a source of much needed revenue for St Andrews University in this image, with an American student – on appropriate fees, of course – encouraged to write a thesis on ‘The Presence of the Phallic Symbol on Raisin Monday’.
Suddenly feeling old, I pass a student being hosed down by a first aid attendant, and cross the cobbles, stepping over the initials of the Protestant martyr Patrick Geddes, incinerated on that spot in 1528. What would he have given for that much foam?
I go into the refurbished university library, with more and more computer terminals replacing books. Those who have disdained the foam fight are working on modules on their laptops, calculating the quality of degree they can expect. If you’ve paid good money, they can’t send you away without a parchment in a tube. A female is chatting in an unidentifiable language on Skype, and I presume it’s her beaming granny in the orient who is on the screen. The Americans are here in force.
Who knows but I’m sitting beside a future Clinton – or even another Monica. Later the deserted quad looks as if there has been an early snowfall. However, I am still carrying on my back the ghost of the Mae West lookalike. Are these raindrops, or my tears?
Lorn Macintyre is a writer and poet
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