By the Sea… by the beautiful sea…

Lovely St. Andrews by the sea was a welcome respite from big-city Glasgow. It is very much… a village. Our hotel was roomy, but because it was the off season, there were only a few of us knocking about the traditional sandstone building. The proprietor was a chatty man, happy to have a few guests to regale with tales of the bad golfers he meets. The shopkeepers are upbeat and smile a lot. There are more cobbled streets and old buildings in town than you can shake a stick at, yet the town is quite modern enough to keep the population and community well stocked with what they need. St. Andrews is… kind of perfect.

It’s definitely a college town. Getting there from the train station in Leuchers (say “lukers”) by taxi is ridiculously expensive — reminding us a great deal of trying to get from St. Helena to Angwin in undergrad days. Instead of being at the top of a mountain in a volcano crater, it’s at the end of a road going out to sea, and as it is with Angwin, once you’re in there… you’re there.

St. Andrew’s is stuffed with people in their twenties. T. gave up on getting a cup of tea at Café Nero during “rush hour,” which was from 10:30 until ten after eleven, when many students were dragging themselves to their first course of the day. Coffee shops are inhabited from dawn to dusk, as students drift in throughout the day, and there are coffee shops, tea shops and bookstore-and-coffee shop combos almost every block. It’s quite a difference from Glasgow which has pubs instead of coffee shops in its smaller neighborhoods. St. Andrews somehow has a both slower and a faster pace (which all that caffeine fuels), as the wind blows briskly, the students hustle along the sidewalks with places to go, and the little village by the sea ticks along, clean and tidy and cute.

All of that has to come at some price — and it does. D. was ever so gently discouraged from applying to St. Andrews’ PhD program — because they are perfect. They only back a sure thing. See, St. Andrews’ Philosophy Dept. has a 100% job placement for their PhD’s. They’re afraid to take an American into the program who doesn’t have extensive undergraduate work in philosophy because they can’t take the risk of messing up their record. They want him to apply to their M.Phil (another Master’s degree, but with research instead of teaching) and not their PhD program, and if he does, they will immediately make room and he could even start this summer.

It was disappointing, to say the least, but D. has been thinking and talking and has concluded that he would like philosophy as an area of study to have some sort of real world application, so he may need to move into another area. Conversation with the University of Edinburgh has been going with two departments now, and the response has been enthusiastic, so …stay tuned.

Last weekend’s performance of The Creation at Bute Hall was… phenomenal. And though T still maintain that the sopranos were a bit shrieky/shrill, and the tenors came in late and then mucked up the tempo trying to compensate at least once, and rather noticeably, most people thought the entire enterprise was lovely. Slouchy, shaggy haired boys became urbane, suave and dashing men with the discreet application of what are here called DJ’s — Dark Jackets, which is another way of saying “evening dress,” — tuxedos and bow ties. A scruffy, Ugg-booted gaggle of girls transformed into resplendent ladies — well, mostly. With no tuxes, and the only rule being “wear all black,” T. maintains that the men looked significantly more crisp and refined, but one can report that there was at least a substantial amount of um… glitter applied to the girl’s side…

But we digress.

The concert took up an entire weekend, between orchestra rehearsal, soloist rehearsal, dress rehearsals and performance (and the hour it took to not only find a bathroom [which, in the UK, is always in the basement] and then wait through the monumental line [apparently people did not have to use the facilities in the 1600’s when the buildings were built? Perhaps the courtyard had a garderobe?]), but it was worth being occasionally discomfited, bored or famished to sit behind twenty violins and violas and watch the mesmerizing rise and fall of the bows as they played.

Our concert was chamber music at its finest — actual chamber music, as in, here we all are, in a chamber with no electronic sound amplification. It was really neat to see what acoustics can do in a lovely old building with high flung arched ceilings — there really was no bad seat in the house (although they were all wooden. The concert: three hours. I assume people brought cushions. Eek.). And what a building! We wished very much for decent camera equipment, but it’s enough getting to rehearsal on time with our scores, much less pounds of cameras and tripods and lights — so you’ll have to make do with cell phone pictures of the glorious cathedral windows. Normally one expects religious themes in the windows, but these were put in during the late 1700’s, and contain medieval scenes instead, and apparently depict members of the faculty of the time. The repeating motif — stamped in gold on the blue pillars and dotting the woodwork — was the stylized fleur de lis, but the wall papers were covered not with lilies but with the thistle that symbolizes this auld isle. That was pretty darned cool.

It’s been a hoot to figure out music in the United Kingdom. D. has been playing the violin since he was five, so he’s no musical slouch (unlike T. who still reads music rather ploddingly), but some of what our director, Marjorie, said, at times flew right over both of our heads. We’d look at each other from our various sections and stifle laughter. What, we wondered, were a crotchet, a quaver, a minim,and a semi-quaver?! We never did remember to look these things up when we got home — but now we have launched ourselves into Music Theory 101a (Remedial) to get ourselves up to speed BEFORE January, when we begin rehearsal anew. You will be pleased to note that a crochet is merely a …quarter note. There are two crotchets in a minim, so a minim is a half-note. A quaver is an eighth note, or a half crochet, a semiquaver is of course a sixteenth note, thus making a hemidemisemiquaver — and I kid you not, that is real — a sixty-fourth note, or 1/16 crochet, which fortunately we did not really run across or we might have fainted from the strain of trying not to laugh.

We have been to the mall: and we have survived.

People who know T. well have heard of her shopping revulsion (her eldest sister has been trying to apply retail therapy for years), and it only gets worse near major gift-giving holidays. D. opened his closet the evening before dress rehearsal to realize he’d shed not only a few pounds but a few suits, and all he was left with was charcoal pinstripes — not a plain DJ in the lot. So, the Hobbits had to go shopping in Dante’s Ninth Circle, formerly known as Marks & Spencer.

OH. MY. WORD.

Our friend Donal likes to collect news footage of the post-Thanksgiving sale violent debauchery in the U.S. (and insinuate, may we say smugly, that people in the UK would never be like that), and though no one pushed and shoved and punched heads, and no blood was shed that we saw, at times it was a near thing. ALL OF HUMANITY seems to have needed to go to Buchanan Street shops last Saturday night (and we say “night” loosely, as the sun does seem to go down at 2:30 sometimes. It was no more than 4 p.m., and the streets…were…packed.) It was HIDEOUS. We are blessed because D. seems to be taller than at least three quarters of the population of the UK, so T. could almost always see him, and eel through clumps of loudly talking, smoking, exclaiming, kissing, chatting older ladies with pancake makeup, teased, peroxided hair and tarantula lashes standing smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk, never mind the fifteen thousand people trying to thread their way past your inane conversations about your leopard print nightie — and yes, that was just the sidewalk. Often we have commented that we are now impatient in traffic jams, since being on foot, one never has to stop moving.

Let us now amend that: One never has to stop moving unless one is near a major shopping thoroughfare. Which we will make every effort not to be until this madness has passed.

We had intended to send out lovely photographic holidays cards — they may be New Year’s cards. Though D. has a month free of academic instruction, he has another two major papers pressing on him, as well as a major programming project for the business, to generate some extra funds. We expect we’ll be working quietly through the remainder of the month, but we’ll keep you all updated on our mini-adventures. The wind and sleet and dark of night have not daunted us yet. Keep us in your thoughts, as our thoughts are always of, if not “home,” then friendly faces and familiar smiles. Joy to you, wherever you find yourself this season.

– D & T

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