Jamie Ross: Over Perturbed in St Andrews

When I was roughly sixteen years old, I calculated that I had gained all that I could from human interaction and took the decision to exist almost exclusively on the […]


When I was roughly sixteen years old, I calculated that I had gained all that I could from human interaction and took the decision to exist almost exclusively on the internet.

This has its drawbacks. Lack of sunlight has made my skin thick and grey like an elephant’s and sometimes, when I’m forced outside for crisps, someone might ask me for the time and, panicking, I desperately jab at their skull in the hope that they minimise. But they never do. They never do.

On the whole, however, I have carved out a happy existence for myself here. I have upwards of a thousand followers on Twitter – which is in fact more followers than Stephen Fry had when he was 23 – and the likes on my Facebook statuses quite often reach levels which a daywalker like you could only dream of.

Or, rather, that was the case. Yes, that was the case until you all started walking about and overhearing daywalkers speak to daywalkers and posting the results on my internet, reaping in likes which are rightfully mine. I watched in horror as a recent post about your “May Dip” reached over one thousand likes; more than three times my Facebook friendbase and more than one thousand times my actual friendbase.

Well I’ve had enough. I’m sick of it. You come over here, stealing my likes, and quite frankly I wish you would all go back to where you came from. Here is just a tiny selection of my least favourite things about Overheard in St Andrews.

Posts About the Prospects of Arts Students: I have two high-achieving older brothers. One has a first class maths degree and works at HSBC, the other manages an advertising firm from a diamond-encrusted lair in Hong Kong. My highest achievement, however, is that Duncan Bannatyne once gave me a personal bollocking on Twitter for asking why, as a successful businessman, he is yet to learn that ‘pound’ is not the correct plural of ‘pound’. How do you think this makes me feel? How do you think it is at Christmas when my Gran asks us all for our news? She doesn’t even know what Twitter is, for fuck’s sake.

My one saving grace is that I got into Prince William’s university because of a legal loophole about accepting a certain number of students from schools where you are more likely to be thrown down a stairwell in a bin than graduate with any meaningful qualifications. But you can’t even let me have this, can you? “Arts students face an eternity of financial oblivion because of their pointless degrees – ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!!!”

Well, do you know what? I may well spend my entire life living with my parents, but you will be in an office or a laboratory whilst I’m annihilating some Japanese children at Mario Kart from the comfort of my own bed. Get off my internet.

Posts About ‘the Locals’: I have written before, in a column about the Kate Kennedy Club, about St Andrews and its inexplicable social tolerance of arseholes in pastel-coloured trousers. “How odd” I could feasibly have thought at the time, “it is that men can have such terrible personalities and wear those trousers and yet still acquire friends with no obvious use of force or blackmail”. I concluded, after much unnecessary postulation and calling myself a miserable puddle of arse-water, that it was probably best just to ignore them. I knew what I was getting myself in for when I came here, it’s all part of the university experience and I might even miss it when I’m gone and unemployed.

But imagine living here. Imagine spending your adult life here with an annually-regenerating quota of the trouserfolk. Imagine hopscotching your way through vomited-up cava on the streets every Saturday morning until you either move or die. Imagine having to get to an important business meeting but being stuck behind Alistair Moffat on a massive horse. The local people of St Andrews are nothing short of heroes for putting up with us.

But do you respect them? No. You laugh at them. Ye tyyyype in thur funneh Scotch ackseeeeeeeehnt. You desperately scrabble for the like button, like a pig in dirt, whenever one of them says a swear word on a bus. You baulk in horror at them for having the temerity to enter The Lizard without having achieved the necessary academic entry requirements. Get off my internet.

Posts About the Library: I spend as little time as possible in the library. I fetch the necessary books and scuttle back to my flat as quickly as I can like a squirrel gathering acorns for winter. This simile is not funny but it is, however, accurate. And that is half the battle.

You, on the other hand, seem to have created an entire library way of living. You keep going on about “schweffing”; a word invented by a PhD linguistics student attempting to prove his thesis about how peer influence makes undergraduates use certain words even if they instantly make you seem awful. You boast about “procrastinating”; a word so overused on Overheard in St Andrews that posting it is the only thing which can make me hope that a person leads an ultimately unfulfilling life. You make funny little ‘official notice’ signs which all of my friends like whilst outrageously ignoring my important fanblogs about television archaeologist Neil Oliver. Get off my internet.

Posts About Posts Which Were Bad Posts: Lastly, there is a special place in hell.com for posts about posts which were bad posts. If someone posts something which is deemed not to be in the spirit of Overheard in St Andrews, you are on them like a tonne of boring idiots.

Some of you may have realised that, as this column essentially is a post about posts which are bad posts in Overheard in St Andrews, there was a vague subtext in that last paragraph. I am using all kinds of fancy literary devices and there is nothing that you can do to stop me. However, as all posts about posts which were bad posts in Overheard in St Andrews result in attacks by people who support the original posts and disagree with the subsequent postees, all I can say now is:

Come at me, noobs.