Scottish things and people that I like

- 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.

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.

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#3,124 - RJG's quiff.