Bell Street, or My Education in Envy

By Eliza O'keefe

In one of my classes, the table has a rectangular hole in the middle, and you can look down the middle and see everyone’s shoes. Adidas trainers, ballet flats, flats with nylons, black boots, some of them very chic indeed—patent Mary Janes with a double strap. This magazine recently published a how-to guide to the St Andrews uniform, which, within reason, is not difficult to emulate. Observe and reproduce.  

But what about the St Andrews flat? 

Where you live here is as much of a status symbol as what you wear, but it’s also different, because people don’t walk around holding placards with their addresses on them. The person next to you in a lecture could be ensconced in the most desirable flat in town—on my own (vainly) coveted Bell Street, say. But unless you know that person, you can hardly ask where, and unless you really know them, you’ll continue to speculate on how exorbitant the rent could be.  

Image taken by Eliza O'keefe

When I was still in halls last semester, during the low-grade fervour of flat-finding season, I would walk home at night past rows of glowing bay windows. Inside were rooms with improbably high ceilings and elaborate cornices. When would these rooms appear on Facebook, or in the online listings of any one of the abundant letting agents that populate South Street—Rollo’s, Alba, the more exclusive Lawson & Thompson? Some eventually did, at unconscionable prices (and a fair few of them through Lawson & Thompson). But others never would, I learned, because they were handed down through friends, friends-of-friends, academic families, in a kind of royal line of succession. These flats were real; you saw them every day, and this combination of presence and ghostliness rendered them especially appealing.  

In certain aspects of life in St Andrews, there are invisible barriers, impossible to confirm until you run head-long into them. In this case, what appear to be wholly financial barriers are in fact based on a rarefied mixture of class background, the right kind of social acumen, luck, and good timing. So while I knew not to expect an en-suite on North Street, I couldn’t shake the thought, even after I’d signed my lease, that the flat of my dreams existed in the town centre, affordable but still totally unattainable.  

I’m fond of my current place, which is in one of the blank-faced duplexes that fill the residential streets down past the Kinnessburn. People tend to praise how cheap it is, though they’re not overawed when they see our wallpaper. I like being able to look down my street and see the town’s buildings rising up at the end, heaped among the trees, though I also look at them longingly, like Jay Gatsby looks across Long Island Sound: where’s my St Andrews Dream? Don’t expect to settle down once you lock down a lease of your own. Every flat you visit subsequently will be ripe for comparison: washer-dryer when you only have a washer; clean, unpainted doorknobs; or, on the other hand, some dismal attribute that makes you especially pleased with your own situation. Flat envy, flat superiority—neither’s very flattering, and I wish there were some cure. 

In a social milieu like ours, though, aesthetic signifiers will always communicate what they do: glamour, status, ease of movement through the world. But these are symbols, and a flat is a discrete, practical space. Fairy-light it; poster it; fill the hole in the floor with socks, as a friend of mine has done. Make it yours. Studying here is also an education in comparing your life to others’ lives, and to order anyone to stop doing that would be dishonest. Don’t try to talk yourself out of envy— just try not to confuse the symbol with your sense of self.