Scotland is lovely – but not centre of the universe
HOLIDAY season beckons and the latest trick to speed you over the threshold of some distant foreign shore is to declare loudly at passport control: ‘We’re from Scotland!’
To hear Nationalist cheerleaders tell it, you’ll be borne shoulder-high by a jubilant crowd, assured ‘You’re money’s no good here, my friend. It’s all on the house!’ and given the entire run of the place like some mediaeval potentate.
Now I have had foreign faces light up at the mention of Scotland, especially around Saint Quentin in Picardy, France, where the Jocks – including my grandfather with the Royal Scots Fusiliers – wrote themselves into history as liberators in the Great War.
One mild-mannered French museum worker proudly showed me a picture of himself in full pipe band regalia.
Such was his admiration for Scottish martial prowess on the battlefields (and our troops’ vast capacity for ‘ving blong’ off them, not to mention an eye for the mademoiselles) that he spent weekends with a re-enactment society, head full of skirling tunes and notions of bonnie fechters.
But the Nationalist fad for this sort of thing is all founded on the shifting sands of Scottish exceptionalism, the idea that we are superior to boorish Little England with its xenophobic Brexit.
Aren’t we all about Jock Tamson’s bairns and ‘Here’s ma haund, pal!’, popular the world over as Scotland is the name on every lip? Actually, no. I’ve had great welcomes abroad on saying I’m British.
In Greece, I’ve twice had very old men who spoke little English battle to express their gratitude for the lifting of the Nazi yoke.
On Zante, one shopkeeper held up a queue of irate German backpackers while he vanished to rummage in a back room. He emerged and triumphantly handed me a glass bearing the logo of the local Mythos beer I was buying.
He heartily slapped my shoulder and declared in a heavy accent ‘For the war!’ as though I had splashed ashore with the Royal Marines to liberate the island rather than having hopped off an airliner a couple of hours earlier...
But once in backwoods Georgia, I found three young Americans with their heads out the serving hatch of a fast-food drive-through because of my accent.
‘Where are you from, sir?’ one drawled. I got blank looks when I said ‘Scotland’ – one of the kids even seemed to think I was from Scotland County in the neighbouring state of North Carolina when he declared: ‘Heck of a drive from there!’
Mostly, people abroad take you as they find you. Some know Scotland well, like that museum chap, others are sketchy. A Floridian woman told me she was of Scots extraction but her entire knowledge of the place today was drawn from TV’s Outlander. MEANWHILE, most of us are good ambassadors for Scotland – but that’s not to deny the existence of headbangers who are roaring fu’ before the plane has taken off and just want cheap cocktails and a fight with someone in a different football shirt when they get there.
As the schools break up and we toddle off to parts foreign, we may find Scotland is not the centre of the universe and get blank looks rather than rapturous applause at Customs and Immigration.
So what? We should wear our Scottishness lightly and not be the small-minded guy going spare because Scottish banknotes aren’t accepted, or sulking because the Guardia Civil aren’t laying out a tartan welcome mat.