Scottish things and people that I like

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!)

i know a girl who used to work on river city: i asked her about row-sheen's accent. "no, really, she sounds like that all the time," she said.

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

stet did. kind-of.

He also gets respect for his book reviews

no he fucking doesn't. i used to have to sub those things at the sunday, and believe me, it was torture.

no he fucking doesn't. i used to have to sub those things at the sunday, and believe me, it was torture."

Heh, it's testament to your subbing skills then. He's working on a novel apparently - bet you can't wait!

Soft spoken bloke on the Beat Patrol - do you mean David Cavanagh? He's a dude, and what a voice. Have you heard his musical project Phosphene? It involves him reading a story from Arabian Nights over a drone, punctuated by him playing a few notes on an analogue synth, then after another bit of spoken word, pick up a clarinet and tootle away. Then he'll read again before producing a melodica and so on. Delightful avant whimsy.

Glasgow tap water is rank. I think I might even prefer London water.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4719573.stm

Robert Burns is probably Scotland's most famous poet, and some would say rightly so. But what child in Scotland wasn't put off him forever by being forced to recite, parrot fashion, some of his dullest material (or even worse, some 'modern' Scottish poetry like 'The Next Stop's Kirkcaldy' or 'The Finger') in the hope of being given some crappy piece of paper which now languishes lost in the back of one of your mother's drawers? I'll tell you which kind - those that discovered his bawdry. For the truth is, much of Burns' more famous work is actually sanitised versions of the utter filth he used to spend his time jotting down. 'Comin' Through The Rye' originally turned into a lesbo session, and then there's my favourite:

To a cunt

I thought that I would wad a wife,
I wanted one that pleased me,
But on her cunt there grows no hair
and there's the thing that grieves me.

It vexed me sair,
it plagued me sair,
it put me in a passion -
to think that I had wad a wife
whaes cunt was out of fashion.

Plus, he was an alkie womaniser. He only turned to poetry when he burned down his first workplace, pissed out of his head, and was sacked. Before he died at 37, he had somehow managed to father 9 children to 5 different women. A man out of his time. And head.

The 'ironic' answer to Scotland's best writer is William Topaz McGonagall. It's very post-modern to laugh at the ineptitude of the meter and the clumsiness of his rhyming, but beneath it is a real core of what in modern musical terminology we'd happily call outsider poetry and yet harder to directly see is the link to later writers like Ivor Cutler, with odd word structures and an invented grammar. It's hard to pick and choose bits, because I think you need to immerse yourself, but try this from 'Glasgow';

The statue of the Prince of Orange is very grand,
Looking terror to the foe, with a truncheon in his hand,
And well mounted on a noble steed, which stands in the Trongate,
And holding up its foreleg, I'm sure it looks first-rate.

Then there's modern Scottish writing. Alasdair Gray and James Kelman on the West, and Irvine Welsh on the East. I'll stick to Welsh, since I'm most comfortable with this work. For me, pound for pound, Welsh has written some of the best characters in literature. He captures the way they speak perfectly, and lives and breathes his identities. Plus he swears a lot and supports Hibs. What's not to like?

Most Scots don't read books though.

The primary document is the paper, or the magazine. Even magazines seem to be a female only concern, with the titans in the field the Peoples Friend and My Weekly. The former is aimed squarely at the blue-rinse brigade - from the cover, usually an oil painting of the tearooms at Dunoon or a wall in Auchterarder, to the adverts for girdles and wigs inside the back opposite a mini-fun section (I believe I still have the badge indicating I'm a member of Cousin Tom's Own Club somewhere) the whole thing reeked of bus trips to Callander with egg sandwiches. It was like an even more twee version of the Sunday Post, full of heartwarming stories about how someone went round to someone elses for a cup of tea in 1942 and they're still friends to this day. My Weekly aimed itself far more squarely at the daughters of Peoples Friend buyers, with women off knitting patterns on the cover and heartwarming stories about how someone went round to someone elses for a cup of tea last week and they're still friends to this day.

So for men, then, it's all about papers.

The Herald and the Scotsman fullfil the same function. They are mainly bought by Posh Huns and Pan Loafs, both of which only end up reading the sport but enjoy the mental cachet they think they gain.

It's all about The Record during the week. It's a typical tabloid, but one with the misplaced pride in everything SCOTTISH irrespective of whether it's any good or not that dominates much of the country. It has to be read from the back, not the front. It featured Shuggie & Duggie for many years, which ensures the editor's place in Hell.

There are two types of Sunday houses - The Mail or The Post. The Mail is basically a standard Sunday tabloid BUT WITHOUT THE TITILATION. The Post, on the other hand...

Many people have waxed lyrical on the Sunday Post before, but I won't let that stop me. The Post is, at heart, a utopian vision of what post-war Scotland could have been. I believe it's written for people who are genuinely still waiting for VE day to happen, or at least for PC Murdoch to nip ower tae Germany and gie that Hitler a clip round the ear. Only not quite, because that would acknowledge a part of the world outside their own wee existence - let's not forget, this is a newspaper where international news merits only one column, and even then was once cut short to tell the story of Mrs McGlinchy in Achtermuchty whose cat got stuck up a tree. My friend Gavin was once in the centre pages, amongst the clusterfuck of vaguely amusing anecdotes, and was paid moderately well for being chuckled at by pensioners.

There are two highlights, however.

The Friendship Page of Francis Gay is a sort of diary written by Francis, who always seemed to me to be a bit like Michael Landon's angel from "Highway To Heaven", only with rich tea biscuits and flowers for the church instead of wings and good deeds. There's even a spin-off book, for those who can't get enough of salvation by malt loaf.

The Fun Section has always skirted desperately close to the Trades Description act. Some piss-poor puzzles pad it out, but it's most famous for the two main strips - Oor Wullie and The Broons. Both were drawn by Scotland's greatest comic artist, Dudley D Watkins, until he died. Literally, as it happens, since he was doing a Broons at the time. They're easy targets, and Ken Harrison is the only artist since Watkins who has come close to the character and life of the strips that shone out of the page in the Watkins era, but they can, and have, been truly great. Perhaps the biggest problem is that they still can't decide what decade they're set in. I remember one Wullie where he is taken to both Glasgow and Edinburgh in the same day by an uncle and everybody, parents included, fail to believe him until postcards turn up from both. This could have been credible, had it not been written about 5 years after the M8 was built. There's also a Broons where Paw, after being forced into buying fish suppers for the whole family, is confronted with them all picking different things now chippies do stuff like pizza, curries etc. All well and good, but HE PAYS FOR ALL 11 PEOPLE WITH A SINGLE NOTE. Unless it's a £50, NAE CHANCE.

But the best thing about the Broons, is Frank Quitely's affectionate parody, The Greens.

ihttp://www.northernlightz.com/images/story_the_greens_row03.gif

is a sort of diary written by Francis

er: written by whichever jobbing hack has really pissed off the editor that week. i don't know if there ever was a francis gay, but there certainly isn't now.

And, aye, the Broons were great but generally when they pretended to be timeless. I saw a Spice Girl in an Oor Wullie once, I'm sure. And a gameboy. But let's not forgot the seminal moment of Maggie in a bikini.

xpost curses