David Russell Apartments

There’s no doubt I’ve put these pivotal moments of my life on unnecessary and undeserving pedestals. This book ought to be testament enough to that. But, apparently, I hold an undeserved reverence for the streets and buildings as well.

A few years ago, on discovering my old haunt David Russell Hall had been reduced to raw masonry, I found myself looking with a kind of venom at the newer and – let’s be honest – much, much nicer David Russell Apartments.

Maybe it was that bracing Fife wind roiling over the plain, or maybe somebody had just told me what it was going to cost to stay in DRA for 38 weeks, but as I stood staring over the decimated landscape, I had to dab at my eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, DRH was an abomination of a hall, and deserved to be razed to the ground by any civilized society. In the worst halls sweepstakes it was second only to the dark canker that is Andrew Melville, an atrocity of such magnitude that the earth itself has been attempting to swallow it since the mid eighties.

But DRH had character. It had spirit. It had community. All of which is a kind way of saying how naff the place was. It had those things by neglect as much as design but, sure, it had them. That was what let students make it their own. It was just run down enough to be open territory.

It had the same rules as the other halls, but they were out of place in a dive like DRH. The ‘no blutack’ rule seemed laughable in a place where the paint came off the walls if you coughed too hard. You used blutack anyway, and considered the warden lucky if you’d run out of permanent markers. That was what made those places a community; we were in it together, sure, but because we could own it, not just sleep in it.

You can’t say that about the new halls. They’ve got an ethos. The people who made them still think about them, they’re still proud of them. They can’t be owned by students, because someone else has a claim. Those halls have still got a statement to make, an image to maintain. And fuck me, they’ve got a price tag to go with it. I stayed in Fife Park because I was poor, not because I liked sleeping on horsehair. Anyone willing to join me in that was part of the goddamn cause. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been more odd not to end up punching holes in the place.

Thinking about Fife Park again as a place, not just a set of memories, makes me want to go back. While it’s still there. To do something. To remember it, or say goodbye, or take a picture. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. I have nothing to give back to Fife Park, nothing to take from it. I’ve been writing about Fife Park for weeks, and I don’t even know what I had there a decade ago. This is the nature of nostalgia. Not just a longing for something long past, but a longing disconnected from tangible wants, and hardwired straight to desire itself, for its own sake, with no outlet.

Whatever I’m looking for, I won’t find it in brickwork.  Besides, most of Fife Park seems to have been made from cardboard.