Patrick Leigh-Pemberton: On lost wallets and the future

In fourth year, people ask you what you plan to do when you leave university. I imagine they ask because they would like to evince an interest in the rest of your life. This is simultaneously flattering and threatening.

Flattering, as people caring about what choices you are going to make is always nice. Threatening, because someone who is looking to make polite conversation is taking more care over your future than you (this might just be me, but I am sure there are others out there who feel the same way). At the moment I reply in a manner that can only be really described as non-committal, mumble about job applications and look the other way. It seems to work.

But there are other layers to that question, and possible answers to it, that I think we should concentrate on. As a result, I have decided to start saying that after St. Andrews, I will miss St. Andrews. This may sound trite, because it is, but I hope that the reasons for it will resonate with some of you.

I am not saying that I want to stay. Because I do not want to stay here; I am ready to leave. But I will be aware of what I am leaving behind. Yesterday is a perfect example of what I am talking about. There I was, ambling gaily along the street, as is my wont, when I wander into a coffee shop. There I discover that the wallet that I had so carefully packed in my pocket that morning, to avoid such an eventuality as not being able to buy anything, has gone and done a runner. I was not too fussed about this.

My wallet does this occasionally, but is thankfully not blessed with legs, so I can normally retrace my route and find it lying on the pavement, begging passers-by for asylum or help to escape its despotic master. This time, however, my wallet was not there. In any other university town, there would have been a 50-50 chance that I would never have seen my wallet again. Not in St Andrews.

Whilst I sweated it out and worried for a couple of hours, the community of unseen angels that make up this town swung into action. The gentleman who had spotted my runaway wallet picked it up, and, ignoring requests for it to be put on a cruise ship to Venezuela and freedom, returned it to the police. Within an hour, he had posted on a group on the Facebook to say that he had done so. Within 3 hours, 4 different, better connected and more internet savvy friends of mine had directed me toward this post. By half past nine this morning, I had been to the police station and recaptured the fugitive.

I can’t say for certain that this wouldn’t happen in any other town. But I can say for certain that it did happen in this town, and would happen again. You see, this is in fact the 4^th time I have dropped my wallet on the street since I arrived here. Every time it has been returned to me, intact and replete, by one route or another. This is something rather special about St Andrews that I am unlikely to find anywhere I can get a graduate job. Where else can one lose a wallet, and find oneself thinking when, not whether, it will return?

Image Courtesy: WellingtonM