Scottish things and people that I like

As mentioned, rowies come very, very close to best Scottish foodstuff ever. Strong showings also by tablet, pies (especially with a bit of bovril poured through the hole in the lid), bridies, haggis, white pudding, red pudding, fruit pudding, fruit dumpling, the entire output of the Tunnocks and Lees factories (speaking of which, someone who used to work for Frances had their wedding cake made by Tunnocks - how ace is that?), irn bru, irn bru chews, deep fried pizza, pizza crunchie, smoked sausage suppers, 'sauce' (though this is lost outside of the East coast), pakora and tattie scones.

But there can only be one winner. PLAIN BREAD.

In a world of lesser carbohydrates, plain bread bestrides the world like a collossus. For those who have never encountered this behemoth, a brief description. Rather than square, plain bread is loosely rectangular around 7" tall by about 4" wide. The top and bottom crusts are around half an inch thick (including the immediately surrounding bread) and most closely resemble masonry painted black. The intervening six inches comprises dough with an atomic weight in five figures. It wasn't so much mixed, as drew the ingredients into the gravitational field it was generating. Eating it requires a spare set of jaws, to take up the chewing when your normal set are tired.

The Pilgrim Fathers took large amounts of plain bread with them to the Americas as temporary accomodation. The Titanic is rumoured to have sunk following an unsuccessful attempt to patch the iceberg hole with plain bread, leading to a weight shift and change in centre of gravity for the hull causing it to tip. A small child once survived in an old fridge in Barlanark for 8 weeks, living on rainwater and half a slice of plain bread.

So why do we love it? Well, it makes great toast (not that it fits in a toaster) especially with lemon curd. But the main reason is surely that most lovely of treats made from leftovers, the PIECE 'n' MINCE.
Name me another bread man enough to carry mince, gravy, carrots and totties without leaking or falling apart.

Exactly.

still can't abide the stuff, though.

The Leopard Man at Kyle

Seals at Mallaig

Ferries at Oban

Nardinis

Codonas Waltzers at Helensburgh

Safeway in Anniesland for some reason

Loch Fyne Oyster Bar

Not really, I just love the Bru is all.

Not Lucky Luke the cartoon, Lucky Luke the excellent Glasgow psych-folk band. :)
http://www.luckyluke.co.uk/

Scotland is a country both united, and divided by language. Whether you end sentences with "but", "by the way", "eh", "aye, well" or "there you are", they're still all identifiably Scottish affectations. The kicker is this though - only other Scots can tell which part you come from through tics like this. Loosely speaking, to outsiders, there are two main accents - the central belt and the rest. Much of the Dumfries and Galloway regional dialect can be quite easily mistaken for low Highland accents to the untrained ear and, lets face it, they only ever talk about farming and incomers anyway. The Central belt, however, has far more divides. There's the East coast and West coast split for starters, but there are stacks of other just as noticeable ones. There's an audible Protestant/Catholic shift, more obvious in Glasgow, culminating in what is usually described as the 'Posh Hun' voice. You know the sort, treasurer of the local bowling club, has a moustache, drives a Rover. Says "Hullooo" through his nose BUT NOT IN A NASAL WAY FOR THAT IS THE WAY OF NED. Nasal Nedness is something else entirely. Or "pure su'hin' else man" if you prefer. The East coast equivalent of Posh Hun is the 'Pan Loaf' accent, which the half of Edinburgh found in the city centre that aren't tourists seems to use. It's odd to go into Edinburgh and not hear a single Edinburgh accent, but then I suppose that's what Leith Walk is for.

This, of course, misses out the joy that is Doric; a dialect (although there are arguments for it being a language in its own right) which is, frankly, impenetrable to most. My mother couldn't understand her father-in-law for around 3 years, and still can't understand her brother-in-law. Frances claims to understand less than half of what my father says, and his accent is quite moderate. On one trip between Inverness and Aberdeen, at a couple of stops she said she was scared I had been possessed as I was speaking in tongues (and I only have handed-down skills, I can barely hold my own in a Doric-heavy conversation). It's the gleeful joy of the dialect that appeals to me the most though, the complete disregard for letter order, grammar or conventional vowel pronunciation (the acid test, for me, is the pronunciation of 'moo' where Doric speakers INVENT A NEW VOWEL SOUND). Syllables are transposed wantonly. Made-up words are used. Words mean different things in different villages. And yet somehow it all makes sense, in some way we all understand each other. That's the best thing about it.

But this is avoiding the one great thing the central belt does better than any other language on God's Earth. Insults.

You can stick your Hispanics, with their maternal fixation. Why bother going on about it when you can sum it up with "Yer maw." Every single permutation of genitalial nomenclature has been used, from the more traditional "fanny" and "prick" to "dobber" and "pie". Stranger yet, however, is the total lack of implication of shared features with the item apparently being compared. To call someone a "poof", for example, casts no doubt on their sexuality. It just means they're a poof. But we don't stop at rude words, oh no. "Numpty" was ubiquitous at one point, but there is a new kid in town.

"Balloon".

In any other language this is simply a rubberised receptacle for expelled air which can for a plaything for a small child. In Scottish, however, the noun conjures a never-before imagined depth of contempt. Imagine the scorn with which Grant Stott looks at a small child who has just asked him in the supermarket (having been prompted by his older brother who is sniggering behind the Sunny Delight display) whether he "goat sloppy seconds eftir yir braer wis finished wi that Titmuss burd". That's what "balloon" means to me.

: (

#3,124 - RJG's quiff.

(Just discovered Still Game cos we're doing it at work; just proofreading it made me laugh so it must be good).

my dad's family [qv the uncles thread] all converse in the doric. it takes me an hour to get up to speed; before that i just sit there nodding like a loon (see?) while they all take the piss out of me.

still, i don't care. being in a room with my dad's family is the only time in my entire life that i, at 5'7", can feel like a towering giant.

I haven't actually nominated anything, yet

the blue nile

as for the sunday post in general ... a couple of weeks ago i got chatting in the station bar - another great scottish institution - to a guy who used to work there, and he swears blind that half the stories were written to fit a specific headline - eg the editor would tell the reporters: "go and find me a story to work with this." his biggest journalistic triumph, he says, was finding something - and they had to be real stories, they couldn't be made up - to fit the headline: "and he even took jam on his corn flakes!"

I used to enjoy the "Who Is In The Wrong?" diagrammatical depictions of traffic accidents in The Sunday Post.

The P&J still carry Robbie's Shepherd's Doric column (if only they called it that), but I don't think they have the whole page anymore, especially since they have different editions.

I like moist things from Scotland.

I meant to say most things, but I'll leave it. Amusement is so hard to come by these days.

I'm with you on this one.

The thing I remember most about plain bread is that, even from Tesco, it doesn't come in a plastic bag like all other bread. It comes wrapped in waxed paper. The downside to this is that: if you have a really, really minging flatmate who has a habit of buying bread, eating two slices and leaving the rest to rot, then with *plain* bread the ensuing mould will creep through the paper and infect whatever the bread is sat on, such as your kitchen table.

Due to the other properties of plain bread mentioned above, mouldy plain bread is very strange indeed. The mould is bright orange, and can reach quite advanced stages of civilisation if your flatmate is as minging as mine was.

the twee hobbit that lives in my heart just sighed girlishly.

Apart from inventing the whole bloody thing in the first place, Scotland has had a surprisingly minor role to play in British television.

This is basically for two reasons.

Firstly, an awful lot of stuff doesn't make it out of Scotland. Bits do, certainly, and comedy in particular seems to travel. Chewin' The Fat and Still Game are recent exports, following in the footsteps of shows like Absolutely, showcase the brutal wit and turn of phrase that marks out the two mainstays of Scottish humour - abuse and surrealism. Lots didn't though. We all grew up watching Thingummyjig, but who outside of Scotland could pick Jack McLaughlin out? Where in England could Fran & Anna possibly fit in? (Actually, scratch that, where in Scotland could they fit in except maybe the nuthouse.) River City is probably the best daytime soap shown in the evening ever, with production values redolent of the heyday of Neighbours and acting consisting of some really top quality gurning and a woman (? Roisin - sometimes it's hard to tell) who you're convinced is putting on a fake accent as it vaccilates between Aberdeen and Dundee UNTIL YOU REALISE SHE'S NOT A GOOD ENOUGH ACTRESS TO PUT ON A FAKE VOICE. But there are worse things. Gaelic language kids shows. Tartan Shorts. And football shows. Christ almighty, the football shows. Arthur Montford pretending to support Morton, with a rictus grin and a jacket that strobed its way across the screen, almost getting excited about a 0-0 draw at Broomhead where the ball only left the centre circle once. Archie McPherson proving his lack of bias by doffing his wig at both managers prior to an Old Firm match. And the later presenters aren't any better...

Leading neatly to point two.

Jim White.

That's unfair, not just him. More the unrelenting wave of unlikeable bastards that assails us when we turn on our screens, building to the point of nausea and escape to the pub. Dougie Donnelly. Chick Young. Viv Lumsden. Martin Geissler. Shereen Nanjiani. Stephen Jardine. Grant Stott. Tiger Tim Stevenson. Alison Craig.

I was wrong, none of them are as bad. It is just Jim White, the smug prick.

Actually, this has turned into "doesn't like", so my favourite thing ever about Scottish television.

In the 70s, telly didn't start early never mind broadcast round the clock. This wasn't a problem except on Saturdays, when there were programmes to be watched before you went out to play. The telly would get turned on, and you would be presented with a stag against a blue background. There would be strident music. "The Campbells are coming." And we would wait. The music would become more bombastic. Hooray! Telly would start soon! The music was coming to a climax! Telly! Yay! The music was over!

And then it wasn't. Sotto voce, the tune would return, almost embarrassed to be back. We hadn't needed to look at the clock, oh no, or if we had then we assumed it must have been wrong. The music would guide us to the beginning. Only it didn't. Then, inexplicably, it would cut out and the programming would start.

WHY? Why was it so hard to employ a modicum of skill in co-ordinating the music with the start of programming? Or was it just bored STV technicians playing with the nerves of Scotland's chilren? INQUIRING MINDS NEED TO KNOW.

I notice nobody has nominated the Herald as one of their favourite things yet.

I forgot Arnold Brown.

(I only proofread a couple of episodes, PJM.)

I recently got all six episodes on a DVD that some fella had made from his own TV recordings

Brian Morton. Radio Scotland's Art Show (sorry, Radio Cafe, now ferrchrissakes) is much, much poorer without him presenting. He could go from discussing Vaan Der Graph Generator to Kafka to the Krankies. The breadth of his intellect is remarkable and he was a very good interviewer. Way better than Mark Lawson on Front Row. He also gets respect for his book reviews, pieces for the Wire and that massive Guide To Jazz On CD he co-writes.

The Sunday Herald - easily the best Sunday paper in the UK. (And the Herald's great too of course Simon!)