Flogging tartan tat is a proud Scottish tradition

SCOTLAND’S extended family gained a couple of new members last week with a tartan for former US president Barack Obama registered in Edinburgh, while Justin Trudeau unpacked a Scottish accent that strongly suggests Canada’s prime minister is a direct descendant of Star Trek’s Scotty.

In fact, Trudeau is a Sinclair on his mother’s side, and has the kilt to prove it. Of course he does: clan tartan is one of Scotland’s greatest exports, even though many of us here are indifferent to it, unless you are a belligerently local Scot whose nationalism is fuelled by the White Heather Club.

Rather than the beating heart of Scotland, clans are more like the appendix: a vestigial organ from the past that doesn’t get used much any more – unless of course you work in a Scottish gift shop.

AS A student I spent a year as an assistant in an emporium that sold kilt brooches, busts of Robert Burns and assorted tartanalia. Economy Secretary Keith Brown take note: no matter what happens to the oil industry, we can always prop things up with the insatiable appetite for children’s T-shirts bearing the legend ‘I’m a little (Loch Ness) Monster’, even when you are 150 miles away in Dundee’s Overgate.

Every day, after snipping ‘made in Hong Kong’ labels from Scottie dogs, we cranked up Andy Stewart’s greatest hits and threw open our doors to coach parties that had been whipped up by their guides into embarking on a competitive Olympics; except instead of medals, the aim was to amass clans and tartans.

Pre-internet, this involved consulting a huge book linking every possible surname to a clan. Even impossible surnames didn’t leave empty-handed; any Schmidts or Olafssons were tactfully upgraded to Black Watch or Royal Stewart.

Looking back, these transactions seem faintly barmy; after all, no one asks for proof that someone in your family was an Irish fisherman before selling you an Aran jumper, or asks you to rope a steer before allowing you to take home cowboy boots.

Yet the clan system remains a stubborn success; on holiday in North Carolina a couple of years ago, I chanced upon a Highland games in the Appalachian mountains where stalls sold tartan ties, Gaberlunzie CDs, plus traditional clannish food ‘such as shepherd’s pie – with all the fixings’.

Shepherd’s pie isn’t especially Scottish, I said, and tried to direct their attention to the Scottishness of Tunnock’s tea cakes. I wasn’t thrown out of the caber-tossing, Highland-flinging celebrations, but the glowering mood was scarcely one of ‘haste ye back’.

Och well. Never mind that clans and Highland dress were cobbled together by Walter Scott for King George, or that most of Andy Stewart’s ballads were written for music halls. Perhaps it’s better to embrace them all as remarkably durable products invented by an imaginative, resourceful people.

Now, who wants to order some of my Gordon clan shepherd’s pie?