Our town through sights and seasons As you wander through the streets of St Andrews, the soundscape winds and shifts with you, never stagnant for more than a step or two. This ‘sleepy’ town is more tumultuous than it immediately appears.  Flapping winds, shrieking seagulls, and the crescendo of crashing waves across three beaches are all constant throughout the year. The yells of students increase tenfold on the last Monday of October, echoed in parallel on the first day of May as the...

Atop the grassy mound to the right of the 18th hole of the Old Course sit seven benches, invisible beneath the bodies of vitamin-D-deprived St Andrews residents on a sunny day. Faces tilted toward the sky, the students fail to notice the sun-warmed gold plaques pressing insistently into their shoulders and backs. It is not the people who these A6 brass frames immortalise, however, that are requesting attention, but those who commissioned them. The plaques reflect the blue light of the...

The Importance of Literature in Dark Times The world has always been about to end. That is, if you listen to the words of Millenarians in 1789, modern-day Jehovah’s Witnesses, pagans circling around Stonehenge, or today, the students of St Andrews amidst a geopolitical crisis. Online, particularly, a mist of despair and fear has descended, muddying the path to a clear mind. This atmosphere of ‘dark times’ is no longer chimeric, even if you can drag yourself away from your phone’s never-ending...