Scottish things and people that I like

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

I had guessed Francis Gay wasn't still alive, unless he was somehow preserved in cryogenic stasis or maybe some home-made jam. I should have said 'Francis'.

suffice it to say: from what he shared, it might as well have been the 1880s/1890s.

I think the rest of the media likes to pretend they don't exist. The Sunday Post never appears in newspaper circulation round-ups either. Maybe that's their choice.

As late as the 1980s, the Sunday Post had a readership of 2.7 million, which represented two-thirds of the entire Scottish adult population, which was some kind of record for saturation.

http://www.fortunecity.com/athena/exercise/2492/OORWULLIE/04b98e40.gif

[geek bit]It's especially amazing they got papers out when you realise that they were working with Quark 1 on SE/30s. 30mins for a mono page to EPS.

I can't believe no-one's mentioned Billy Sloan.

My old flatmates once had a totally made up story in the centre pages of the Sunday Post. I will recount later, but I have to leave NOW to get to the Lansdowne in time for the Celtic game (I may be pushing it a bit)

But this is "things and people that I like"...

Never met the guy, so I don't have anything against him personally, but he does champion some rubbish. Still, his bits on Scotland Today have produced some moments of comedy gold. "He's not a rapper, he's a singer, but I think this will go down well with the young people." On Ian Wright's short lived pop career.

!!!

see, i'm not really named after the damned song: dr grimly-fiendish was actually a character in a children's book called "the founding of evil hold school", by one nokolai tolstoy. and when i started posting to ILX, i'd just been rearranging my bookshelves and found it and ... well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

but i've just dug the book out and i see it's dated 1968. which means baxendale got there first. wow. top work, old cartoon fella.

http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/g/grimfien.jpg

the likeness is uncanny.

FFS. it's been a long day. nikolai.

Excellent.

It's a wonderful truism - "Scotland is beautiful". Unfortunately, most people who end up spouting this venture no further at the weekend than Braehead or The Gyle and ultimately view their escape from the city via the airport rather than the A82 or M90.

Not that this should hamper their enjoyment of the cities. There is only one way to view Glasgow, for example, and that is with your neck craned upwards. Everything exciting about Glasgow happens above head height, with statues and columns adorning otherwise functional buildings (the street level parts of which have been turned into an All Bar One, with work girls thinking they're class as they drink bacardi breezers), which is presumably why you so frequently come across people lying on their backs in the town centre. Don't worry, you can step over them without spoiling what they can see.

Glasgow appears to have been designed by the same architects as the big American cities with bold lines, classical architecture and a distinctive grid system. Edinburgh, on the other hand, appears to have been designed by a deranged jaikie, woken from his slumbers and given 20 minutes to get it finished on the back of a bookies' line.

Once they got bored with streets, or something happened to them, Edinburgh just built new streets on top. As a result, you get things like the Cowgate passing majestically underneath The Bridges looking more like a paved over canal than a road, but betrayed by the likes of Bannermans - a cellar bar, but one that finally turned out to be about 20 storeys below the final floor of the buildings that eventually ended up on top of them. There are lots of lovely buildings, but none of them sit together properly and look like they're the emptied out pockets of some celestial city planner built where they fell.

Once you get out of them though...

Blah blah mountains blah blah heather blah blah. Leave that to Muriel Grey. (Nice though they are)

The joys are in little things. Driving through some of the most beautiful scenery, which changes coast by coast from rolling hills to precipitous cliffs. The tearooms at Luss. Garelochhead. The bridge over the Atlantic. The Art Deco frontage of Oban hotels. Mull and Iona. Drinking heavily in Fort William, under the shadow of Ben Nevis, and wandering along to the Highland Museum. Inverness and its utterly pointless castle. The mist sweeping over Culloden. The visitor centre at the Baxters factory. Gamrie Bay. Pennan, possibly the most lovely town in Scotland. The wind piling through Aberdeen, and trying to stand up in the gales on the promenade. Eating a fish supper in front of the lightship at Anstruther then walking round the fisheries museum. The bottle dungeon in St Andrews. The Queen Elizabeth forests and David Marshall Lodge. The sun setting and hour before it rises in the summer. The sun rising an hour before it sets in the winter.

There are a million reasons, and it seems foolish merely to list them. So there has to be something personal, and for me it's The Glen. Pittencrieff Park in Dunfermline.

Bounded on one side by the Abbey (resting place of at least part of Robert The Bruce, and his official memorial burial site) and the ruined monastery, Pittencrieff Park was once the estate of the Laird of Pittencrieff, until following his death it was bought by Andrew Carnegie and turned over to the people of Dunfermline - reputedly as payback for not being allowed to play in it as a child. I remember it mostly as where Fife primary schools congregated for a joint day out towards the end of term in the 1970s, acres and acres of space for kids to run in and two large paddling pools, but it's so much more in retrospect. It has a much greater scope than similar parks, with an Italian garden, a hothouse, an animal enclosure with birdhouse and aquarium, a tearooms with bandstand... the Andrew Carnegie museum is there now too, and it features Malcom Canmore's Tower which purports to be the home of Malcom III following his glorious return from the murder of Macbeth and the restoration of the throne to his lineage.

Like everywhere else, it's now full of school neds getting pished. But it's still the best place in Scotland.

Though he did study at Carnegie.

(Also - the Scots invented Freemasonry. Therefore, they invented conspiracy theories!)

Andrew Carnegie returned to Dunfermline later in life (around the turn of the century) for several years. (He was about 14 when he left, I think)

The Glen in Dunfermline is rather nice, though.

The nicest view in all of Scottish scenery is on the road connecting Harris to Lewis, as you come over the pass between the two islands* and see Lewis and the glen of Loch Seaforth.

* for people unaware of Scottish geography: although Lewis and Harris are separate islands, they are a single landmass. The islands are separated by mountains, not water.

*Not strictly true, it's actually on East Port, but these are good enough directions for visitors.