The contrived ‘coorie’ campaign by tourist officials has now led to a book on the non-phenomenon

I HAD not intended entering into the stooshie aboot coorie, but someone has to step in and make sense of the situation. “Coorie” is supposed to be the Scottish equivalent of Denmark’s “hygge”. The concept has its origins in a contrived campaign last year by Scotland’s tourist authorities – sound of codswallop alert klaxon – that sought to emulate the Scandinavian guff with something of our own, which they called còsagach.

I commented authoritatively and definitively about this fake hygge in our sister paper at the time and have nothing to add but another column. That’s because someone has now written a book about the non-phenomenon.

It’s called The Art Of Coorie, wisely avoiding the còsagach after Gaelic speakers pointed out that, as well as meaning “snug, sheltered or cosy”, it could also mean “full of crevices”. There are, of course, many crevices in Scotland – led currently by Ruth Davidson – but that’s not what the tourism salesmen were trying to convey. They wanted to emulate the snuggly-wuggly, cuddly, candlelit atmosphere of hygge, which most Danes didn’t know anything about until they were tellt that it was what they loved best. However, that concept appears to have been widened considerably by Coorie author Gabriella Bennett, extending even – reportedly – to the outdoors world which, in Scotland, is rarely cuddly. Suddenly, it was all about swimming in freezing lochs and climbing Munros, something that no-one in their right mind does except for a bet or a suicide bid.

Things took a darker turn when the Daily Mail got involved, running a feature bigging up coorie by a woman who’d moved with her family from London to the north of Scotland and had embraced the Scottish lifestyle, dressing in tweed balaclavas and inhaling vats of cullen skink for her dinner.

As you can imagine, the article attracted facetious comments “below the line”, about both the author and Scotland, which top intellectuals said you could buy in its entirety with the proceeds of a house sale in London.

Indeed, a few days later, the Mail ran a big feature about a Dane who’d become the biggest landowner in Britain, though it turned out all the featured estates were in Scotland. Apparently, he likes nothing better than getting his hygge oot in a big Scottish castle.

The Mail warned Scots not to voice “chippy complaints about the injustice of a single wealthy owner now owning such vast swathes of Scotland” so, as a good loyal lieutenant (see below), we’ll say no more about it.

Others have spoken out, however, querying the definition of coorie, claiming it back for the peasantry from bourgeois writers with their pious mince about “wellness”. Oddly enough, the Scottish National Dictionary gives one definition of coorie as “cringe” and, indeed, there’s surely a book to be written about Scotland called The Art of Cringe.

I won’t be writing it and neither am I going to knock people trying to say something positive about Little Scotia, even if it is somewhat suspect. I trust that has cleared the matter up for everyone. To summarise: hygge is bosh, coorie is bilge, and we cannot complain because that would be chippy.

Light disbelief

FAKERY is fast becoming reality in this, the best of all inhabited worlds that we know about. You’ll have encountered fake news – and, in this column, fake views – but the phenomenon is now moving towards the celestial spheres, ken?

Those of you with radiograms may recall Starman David Bowie crooning: “Don’t fake it, baby; lay the real thing on me” (I’ve added the semi-colon in the hope of starting a new musical genre of grammatical rock).

That was in his Moonage Daydream, the sentiments of which are being inverted in yonder China