Grasping the thistle

BLOOD AND WATER Jessie Macfarlane Parker Scryfa, £5, www.scryfa.com

IF you want a fresh look at what it means to be Scottish, you could do worse than ask a Cornishwoman. More particularly, 22-year-old Jessie Macfarlane Parker, whose pamphlet Blood and Water delves into what it means to feel rooted to two places at once. The unusualness of this essayist-memoir adds to its intrigue. Here we have a Cornish writer dissecting multi-faceted Scottish identity through the prism of personal experience. XXXMXaXcXfaXrlane Parker is up front about it: “No doubt about it, I’m Cornish (with a good helping of Scottish). I’ve lived my entire life on Bodmin Moor, understand the most impenetrable of accents, and have genuine pasty withdrawals. Scotland, its people, landscape, traditions, literature, music and food, have always been a part of my life. Yet my time spent up north is always as a tourist, never a local.”

So, what qualifies her to throw insights or perspectives in our direction? One response may be that every nation is and always has been more complex in its make-up than it often admits. But more than that, Macfarlane Parker comes at her subject with the benefit of being simultaneously an outsider and insider.

Daughter of a Cornish father, and a Scottish mother who traces her ancestry to the same plot of Scottish turf over centuries, she says: “Most of us have a rough idea of where our great-grandparents came from, though few can say that they know further than that. But I am able to locate my family to a small island, Inchcailloch, on Loch Lomond.”

Her writing is never less than poetic, with water serving as the metaphor. Cornwall may be synonymous with the sea, but Macfarlane Parker attributes as much of her love affair with water to time spent swimming on Loch Lomond.

The writer is quick to locate her observations in a world in which migration, for love, curiosity, family, the need for work or for refuge – transcends so many borders.