Alyce Shu: My Last Raisin

This was my last Raisin Sunday. Walking to my Revenge, I heard the sweet sounds of Raisin: children attempting to walk while tied together in the most illogical ways, the public appeal for condoms, and the girl I saw screaming after her friends, “I LOST MY IPHONE!” at about 11:30 AM. With the sun beaming down Market St, the tourists faces all bemused, I had one of those cinematic moments when the voiceover narrates something trite like, “It was the best of times”.

My first Raisin found me covered in permanent marker, wearing a white Dumbledore beard, and taking the task, “find Harry Potter”, so much to heart, that I convinced some boy with round glasses to come back to my academic mother’s flat. By 7 PM, at my third academic parent party, my friend’s academic father had put us both into a room because we couldn’t stop crying.

My second Raisin was spent Revenging my mother with my seven other academic siblings. We woke the poor girl up at 10 AM after a long night at Welly Ball with some gin in a water bottle. We then proceeded to do a house crawl, culminating in a long game of stairs, whereupon my mother passed out at about 1 PM. As we debated what we should do about her, she suddenly woke up, eyes a flutter, and ran her ass out the door. My brothers took chase, but she was booking it down Hope St. Later that day I ended up at a flat party where five guys decided to spontaneously streak naked down Alexandra Place and we all decided to leave them to it.

My third Raisin we had a two-flat block party, the massive 18-foot bouncy castle in the back, and—I am proud to say—none of my kids threw up. The messiest thing that happened was a super soaker vodka fight gone awry. I left soaking wet and smelling like debauchery, the only real victim.

I’m not going to say there aren’t parts of Raisin I will not miss. Freshers peeing out of windows onto the street, plant pots on roundabouts, and the truly insupportable story of drunken verbal abuse to a thirteen-year-old girl who had wandered off from her parents. But the thing is, banning Raisin will only make it all the more exciting and probably more devious. If the University makes Raisin something underground then who’s to say it won’t go the way of American fraternity hazing, all feeding freshmen semen on a cracker and abject fear.

While I hope this time next year I will not still traipsing around in a strawberry onesie being forced to ask people for hypothetical sex, I hope that Raisin will still go on, and that some other St Andrews student is doing it instead.