Shona McGarry | Blogger
The latest club in St Andrews is open until 2am. It’s called The Lizard – a Wezz-a-like for posh kids who just want to have a little fun but don’t have a trendy house party to go to. It’s small. It’s sweaty. You will get punched (however inadvertently) in the face. You will pick an outfit that says ‘No, I Don’t Ever Want To Wear This Again’, which is exactly the kind of come-hither attitude that attracts the boys, and you will probably emerge into the cool St Andrews night at five past two wondering why your mum isn’t ringing you demanding that you get home because you’ve got a Junior Cert Irish grind in the Institute the next morning. The Lizard isn’t cool. It isn’t pretty. But it’s where everyone ends up when they want to hit it hard (which, obviously, I do).
Of course, the Students’ Union opens until two but the toilets are prefabs and the vibe is ‘1970s Caravan Club,’ so you don’t go there unless you’re not up for the Lizard and you don’t want to pay more than a pound for a G &T. In that case, the Union is an inevitability, like the essay I have due next week on Synge, who is pronounced ‘Singe’ over here, no matter how many times I’ve tried to tell them that I know this, I’m from where he’s from!
Last Friday we were in that kind of mood, so the Union it was. I observed someone in my class get stuck in a door, which was, admittedly, a highlight. The smoking area was peppered with vastly differing takes on college nightwear. There were sparkles and high heels from someone who looked like she had momentarily mistaken the Union for Coppers, and wellies and Barbours from a horsey-looking set who probably should have been drinking sherry at their estate. Inside, everyone was flirting or looking around vacantly, and Ellie Goulding’s Burn was actually on repeat. We left early. Even grown-up Wezz was better than that.
When I got back Danger Medic – one of my illustrious kitchen pals – was floating around the corridor, telling raucous anecdotes about violent Irish people, like the one he thought would make me laugh, involving someone called Pete and an outburst in a nightclub (it didn’t).
The next day the ‘nightlife’ continued as we ventured out to Edinburgh, me with my overtired boyfriend in tow (do I wish he went here? Sort of. The LDR agrees with me insofar as I don’t have to bother trekking out to UCD to see him all the time. But then I’d rather trek out to UCD than trawl through Facebook photos every few weeks trying to remember what he looks like). Now, two of my friends are actually from Edinburgh, so it is entirely their fault that we ended up at a place called The Shack, which is not unlike the Lizard in that it may actually be the Lizard on holiday. It’s the kind of club that you walk past and say, thank Christ I’m not going in there. Only we did go in there, despite observing a man deep into his thirties neck five bottles of WKD one after the other as he waltzed in.
There were sparkles and high heels from someone who looked like she had momentarily mistaken the Union for Coppers, and wellies and Barbours from a horsey-looking set who probably should have been drinking sherry at their estate.
The photos are gritty and the tequila was expensive, but jiving (yes) to Grease Lightning and that song from Dirty Dancing in a place that proclaimed itself to be ‘Beyonce and Lady Gaga free’ was worth the £5 entry fee. And, besides, a night out in Edinburgh was a real Night Out, and the noise of a city was like the noise of Dublin, not just the after-hours murmur that St Andrews seems to make. It made me nostalgic for the grimy after-hours look of Dublin, instead of the still-perfect 2am sight of St Savaltor’s Quad. I was proud of showing my boyfriend the beautiful Quad the morning that he left to go back home. And when he did leave, I was surrounded by beautiful buildings on my own,, only it didn’t feel so lonely anymore. It felt like, well, home.
@shozzmcgozz
