Scottish things and people that I like

I forgot that most of all I love Gregory's Girl and Belle and Sebastian.

2. Eat a buttery
A traditional Doric delicacy, the Aberdeen buttery rowie is a gloriously Atkins-unfriendly combination of flour, yeast, salt and fat. Don’t be put off by the rock hard specimens they serve in Halls – get yourself to a local bakery for the real deal. Eaten with a nice bowl of homemade soup, there’s nothing better to fortify you against the North-East winter.

Absolutely and Still Game. The book Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Ivor Cutler and the Incredible String Band. Some of the ned slang/retorts. "Away an run up ma ribs" etc. Irn Bru and anything Tunnocks. Oh and Altered Images. Scotch broth, Abroath Smokeys.

Other good things: Mackies honeycomb icecream, Highland cattle, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Still Game (xpost!), Archie Gemmill's goal against Holland, West Highland accents.

YOu know, all these things "feel" the same, even Momus. It's like, I dunno, a droll yet twee grimness.

God, yes. The phrase "yer maw" is fantastic.

Yes, they do, but I think you can do that if you just pick things that are similar. I mean, Eddie Reader, Taggart, Thingummyjig and Joey Deacon Blue don't feel like that.

Anyway, while you're mulling that one over, here's a random alternative list of non-pastoral, not gently surreal, uncosy spokespersons of a nation:

Janice Galloway (writer)
Bobbie Gillespie (musician)
Wattie Buchan from The Exploited (punk)
Bill Drummond (artist)
George Galloway (politician)
Elaine C. Smith (actress)
Alex Ferguson (sports mananger)
Peter Mullen (actor/director)

Excellent at swearing, all of them.

Add Rosie Kane and you've pretty much got the antithesis of the spokeslist I would make.

Yeah, Gregory's Girl is great. Much love for Local Hero too. Still not seen That Sinking Feeling though. Must seek it out. What's Bill Forsyth up to these days?

Whisky Galore!

Takin' Over The Asylum

Robbie Shepherd (presents the Scottish country dancing programme on BBC Radio Scotland and spiks the Doric. His Doric column (boom boom) is the best thing about the Press & Journal. He's a dude, min.

Doric chat up lines: "Fit like ma bonny quine?"

Yer maw! Fannybaws! Whit!

Still Game is great of course (and it's on in ten minutes, hurrah!) but Navid deserves singular praise. "Ye mad shagger ye!" "Quality."

Bud Neill - surrealist Glaswegian cartoonist of the 50s. Created Lobey Dosser, whose statue sits on Woodlands Road. The strip transplants an East End community to the Wild West. Sheriff Lobey Dosser rides a two legged horse called El Fideldo and his arch nemesis is Rank Badjin. Its sensibility is remarkably modern, rich in references to pop culture of the time. Really odd and funny. http://netsavvy.co.uk/lobey/

Taking Over the Asylum is utter genius and if you search it on ILX you'll find me calling for repeated repeats for the rest of all time. Or something. I wuv it. David Tennant! Ken Stott! Katy Murphy!

I have oddly high levels of affection for both Robbie Shepherd and The Beechgrove Garden.

The old Old school - The Rezillos, The Skids
The prophets without honour - The Thanes, Gin Goblins
The new school - Sluts of Trust, Sons and Daughters

I'm so bored with: our WONDERFUL post-punk heritage

- Loch Awe
- Morar
- Glenfinnan monument
- Glasgow Celtic
- Scotch Pie
- Deuchars IPA
- Pub opening (by which I mean closing) hours
- Bert's Bar, Stockbridge
- The table football machine that I played in the pretty cool pub in Newtown
- The Forth Rail Bridge
- Belle and Sebastian
- The spring sky in Lothian

"Can't remember the last time I had a bloody boner. I tell I lie. Judy Finnegan, before she went shakey."

The Star Bar?

I like the Forth Road Bridge best actually.

I like pubs that stay open 'til 3am and pubs that open at 4am.

according to a friend, the only thing "fierce" about bobby gillespie is his smell.

Should have been throttled to death at birth.

I don't agree with the person who said George Galloway and Elaine C Smith though.

Are butteries as good as lardy cakes, Ailsa?

-Lecturing in English, rather than reading aloud notes in Latin
-Discussion and discourse between Lecturer and Students during the course of lectures

Only in the afternoons mind, is the hot water in the gents still scalding?

Heretic! Mind you, it's probably why I have fillings now. I drink it quite rarely now.

Billy Connolly: well, he's just another annoying celeb now, but in his day he was very, very funny.

Lord Kelvin - invented loads of cool stuff, worked on the first and second transatlantic cables, established many common practices in the study and teaching of science.

Ian Crichton Smith (poet)

Lucky Luke

Bert Jansch

Linda Thompson

Alisdair Roberts

Cheery Bananas fanzine

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.