CHAPTER SIX
I decided to leave St Andrews in the summer term of my first year. I had to get out of that wee, grey town and fast. Relations with Bramsden had deteriorated. I’d heard he was telling people I didn’t have the wherewithal to complete my DPhil. “This is what happens – ” I imagined him saying, leaving the sentence for others to complete. This is what happens when you let scumbags from dying Lanarkshire steel towns into Scotland’s premier university. Still, if it had just been Bramsden, I could have coped. But it wasn’t. It was the whole place. It did my head in. I was a fish out of water: an East End boy in a West End bar. It was great sharing with Chris, but he wasn’t there that much. Slowly, I came to realise that the kind of friendship we’d had in the past was just that – in t
