Reliving his St Andrews university days, David Walding finds that the old stomping ground has swapped sheep for sophistication after 30 years

The last time I was in Fife I stole a lobster, but I am still at large.

As a student, I spent four hazy but happy years at St Andrews University pretending to study English. My weight went up and my golf handicap came down.

I ‘liberated’ the lobster – a live one – from outside the kitchen of The Peat Inn, then as now one of the best restaurants and inns in Scotland. It was someone’s 21st birthday.

I took the bewildered thing back to my digs: a tumbledown, hideously damp, mice-invested, £4 a week, now long-gone cottage deemed unfit for anyone but impoverished students to live in.

Hearing my friend in the bath, I opened the outside window and, giving my best ‘Jack Nicholson in The Shining’ impersonation, I threw the lobster into the bath.

I have never seen a man move so quickly, apart from at the end of a lecture on Donne.

The 600-year-old university – the third oldest in the English-speaking world – has produced some eminent people. Like cyclist Sir Chris Hoy and the inventor of betablockers Sir James Black, the pioneer of the smallpox vaccine Edward Jenner and King James II of Scotland (who banned golf in town in 1457) and former Rolls-Royce CEO Sir John Rose.

Alumni also include Scottish politician Alex Salmond and lesser-known figures such as Prince William and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge.

I met my wife there. We got married on the same day as the royal couple and have framed Buckingham Palace’s response to my request for an invitation to their wedding.

We hadn’t gone back to Fife since graduating. How the ‘home of golf’ has changed.

We revisited St Regulus Hall, where my wife stayed and where she stuffed me at table tennis on our first date. Too old to jog, we walked the West Sands but didn’t hum Vangelis’s theme to Chariots of Fire.

We remembered that filming of the famous sequence took two days because one of the runner’s shorts kept falling down. The student stars got paid in Edwardian haircuts.

We got vertigo again going up the 33-metre St Rule’s Tower, part of the 1158 cathedral built to house the relics of St Andrews.

And we walked the pier just as we had – hangovers permitting – in our red student gowns after Sunday service in the Late Gothic St Salvator’s chapel.

We toured the famous castle. “Fancy a bit of rough wooing?” my wife suggested.

The castle was besieged between 1546 and 1547 when King Henry VIII tried to marry his son (later Edward VI) to the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. We revisited the bottle dungeon and relived history, apart from the bit about the besiegers “using their bodies in lechery with fair women”.

We walked through the past, back to the Old Course Hotel, which was once so off-limits for a 20-year-old student.

Rich undergrads now use the hotel’s Kohler Spa Waters and gym.

They cover themselves in slimming serums and firming creams and wallow in an effervescing, overflowing ‘sok’ bath. They have ‘a bathing rainbow’ and are strobed by therapeutic sequential hues.

All those years ago, Pont Neuf potatoes didn’t exist and there were no cock-a-leekie terrines or Anster cheese soufflés on menus

To remineralise we used to jump in the North Sea. Back then, chromotherapy was making sure we got up before 2pm and saw some sunlight.

We walked around the Quad, down the Scores, Market South and North Street and into St Mary’s school of divinity. Then we drove down the East Neuk coast, past the fishing villages of St Monans and Pittenweem, to Graham and Rachel’s wonderful, seafront Ship Inn pub in Elie, where they have beach cricket matches during the summer, tides permitting. We did the oatcake and shortbread shops.

Back in town, showing our age, we strolled through the botanic gardens for the first time ever, being reminded by the wind that St Andrews is on the same latitude as Moscow and Labrador.

We followed an enjoyable afternoon tea in Rufflets Country House Hotel by warming up at the Saturday night hoolie in Forgan’s.

All those years ago, Pont Neuf potatoes didn’t exist and there were no cock-a-leekie terrines or Anster cheese soufflés on menus. An amuse bouche was a deep-fried Mars bar.

St Andrews was a less cosmopolitan, less consumerist, less epicurean place.

There was no ‘sustainable restaurant accreditation’. No dedicated golf concierges. No Louis Roederer champagne bars.

There were certainly no €75 tasting menus. Instead, I used to steal the swedes left out for the sheep in the fields and boil them up with tomato puree.

The rooms weren’t deluxe. I woke up one morning with six sheep grazing in my room. Now it’s all thread counts and fluffy togas.

I remember checking out B&Bs for my visiting in-laws. My mother-in-law hated nylon sheets because she snagged her toenails in them. Peover House, where they stayed, is still there.

Our son, who is in his first year studying management, whisky and golf, introduced me to the new bars such as Rascals, Ziggy’s, Lizard Lounge and Droughty Neebors (named after thirsty folk in Burns’s Tam O’Shanter).

There are new restaurants: Little Italy, The Vine Leaf, The Adamson, Playfair’s at The Ardgowan Hotel (which offers ‘Irn Bru brulee’) and the clifftop, glass-fronted Seafood Restaurant.

Over recent years, the home of golf has turned itself into the home of gastronomy with many award-winning restaurants, notably Rocca Grill in Macdonald Rusacks Hotel, where I once worked as a kitchen porter.

Thirty years on, we ate at the table nearest the 18th green and first tee, cooked by newly crowned TV Masterchef winner Jamie Scott.

The hotel is spearheading the Scotland’s ‘Year of Food and Drink’, as is the Old Course Hotel. I never went in as student. The hand-dived scallops would have been lost on me and the orange soufflé with anise ice cream beyond my budget.

There were four golf courses in my day. Now there are seven, not including the Torrance and Kinnocks by the Fairmont Hotel outside of town. As well as the inland heathland Dukes designed by Peter Thomson and owned by the Old Course Hotel.

Dip your hand deep into your sporran and you can go on a bespoke whisky journey around the Lowlands, Highlands and Speyside

The 144th Open Championship (from Thursday to next Sunday) will be the 29th to be staged over the Old at St Andrews.

The first Open was held on the West Coast at Prestwick in 1860.

Tom Kidd, who won the first to be held at St Andrews in 1873, received £11 in prize money. Last year, Rory McIlroy received a cheque for £975,000, from a total purse of £5.4 million.

I walked round the Old Course but didn’t play. I got a two on the first. Once.When I was young.

I have new knees and irreparable pride.

I also missed a three-foot birdie on the notorious 17th and drowned my sorrows in The Jigger, the former railway stationmaster’s cottage next to the Old Course Hotel.

On my debut in its Road Hole Bar, feeling like I was very out of bounds, I had a ‘dramming’ lesson, tasting malts from mothballed distilleries, as well as a tot of Tullibardine, the in-house, on-trend label.

You can learn the old art of ‘half and half’ with beer with whisky chasers, St Andrews Ale with Macallan Gold or Innis & Gunn with Tobermory 10.

Dip your hand further into your sporran and you can go on a bespoke whisky journey around the Lowlands, Highlands and Speyside.

Cash in your pension and don’t send your children to university and you can embark on the hotel’s Outrageous Whisky Journey and pay £525 for three vintage nips of Killyloch ’67, Glen Grant ’49 and a 40-year-old Highland Park.

While the callow ‘Wee Maries’ stay in their rooms, the Yahs and Hooray Henries (you were either a lad or a laird ‘in our day’) now go to St Andrews to have seafood chowder in the Sands Grill and drink cocktails like Sazerac – a mix of Courvoisier Exclusif with absinthe, brown sugar and Peychaud’s Bitters.

When I was a student, class was a pint of Dryborough Heavy. Sophistication was having it in a straight glass.

St Andrews has become very foody and changed a great deal, but not for the worse.

Terms may now be semesters and first year freshers but the East Neuk is still an extraordinary and very special place. Not just for golf.

Go to the Old. Go to the Rocca. And definitely go to the 18th century The Peat Inn, six miles outside of the ‘Auld Toon’.

Try Geoffrey Smeddle’s slow-braised feather blade of Scotch beer followed by coconut mousse, lychee sorbet, lemongrass ganache, pink grapefruit and lime and wash it down with Carte d’Or, Domaine des Baumard, Coteaux du Layon 2012.

But, however beseeching the looks they give you, leave the lobsters alone.

Further information

• St Andrews is an hour’s drive north-east from Edinburgh.
www.visitscotland.com
www.oldcoursehotel.co.uk
www.thepeatinn.co.uk/ stay@thepeatinn.co.uk