Freedom! Scots rituals for life after lockdown ...

1 TAPS Aff. Now that the sun has peeped through, young males are preparing to disport themselves in the streets of our towns and cities topless, the more hardy – or foolhardy – even wearing shorts with their DMs. There are several rules governing this ritual. Tattoos are optional but style marks are given for the more elaborate ones, although there are deductions if they feature men on white horses, the number 55, the tricolour, and hooded figures with ArmaLites. Other bodily decorations, such as scars, quaintly described as chib marks, are generally discouraged.

There are marks, too, for BMI indexes, the lowest being the highest, and if the number of ribs can be counted this gives bonus points.

As with fashion models there is also a mandatory walk, a kind of rolling gait or swagger, reminiscent of a toddler with a full nappy, or a matelot who has just stepped ashore after months at sea. On no account approach too closely to a taps affer because this will be taken as an infringement on his defensible space and it may turn nasty.

Often the young, partially-clothed male will be seen in the company of a young woman, known as the burd, who will be pushing a buggy with a squalling young child wearing a football top, because the parents are aware of the dangers of skin cancer, although, of course, when the kid reaches adolescence it, too, will have developed immunity like them. If the child is sucking a bottle and the sun is out there won’t be milk in it, which could curdle and sicken the youngster, so it will be Buckie, diluted of course.

Apart from pushing the buggy the burd’s role is to carry the fags and any concealed weaponry deemed necessary on the day.

2 THERE are rural rituals too. On the first day of spring, which may have been last week, St Bride’s day is celebrated, with a modern twist. In the old days, when quaint old people used to send letters and talk on the telephone, they dressed sheaves of oats in women’s dresses (no, I don’t know why) and paraded them through the streets. But now, in our gender-unspecific times, it’s quite common to see men in women’s clothes, or vice versa, staring at the Minch, caulking the coracle or carrying packeted cereals.

On Tiree, they enjoyed cock-fighting, but that’s been outlawed for some reason. They tried budgies but they were annoyingly pacific. Traditionally gifts were, and still are, given to the local schoolmaster and in the evening a ball held, not usually the dominie’s.

Islanders have a long history of bludgeoning sea birds. This goes back to at least 1844 when some of the last inhabitants of St Kilda battered to death the last great auk, perhaps suspected of being a witch

3 ONE of the more curious pre-Covid annual events, now reimagined, occurred in Moffat, a Border town famous for having the world’s narrowest hotel and Scotland’s narrowest street. It was the centre of the wool trade, but since someone invented polyester the mills have closed and the knitters have hung up their needles, while others plunged them into veins. It was also the venue for an annual commemorative sheep race where young men chased ewes round the streets looking for life partners, but since a petition of 80,000 people complained it was harassment and unfair that the sheep couldn’t make their own choices it has been cancelled. Since then, such events have been clandestine.

4 OUR islanders have a long history of bludgeoning sea birds. This goes back to at least 1844 when some of the last inhabitants of St Kilda battered to death the last great auk, perhaps suspected of being a witch.You can’t be too careful. They ate just about anything else which fluttered down, from puffin, razorbills (difficult to digest, obviously), guillemots, cormorants and fulmar.

The men of Ness, on the northern tip of Lewis, visit the rocky islet of Sùla Sgeir where they pluck the chicks of the northern gannet, the guga, from their nests and eat them. Usually dried. Although it’s not mandatory. But not with chips, which is.

There was an annual guga eating championship, last won by a man from Glasgow, who had toughened up by eating roadkill, but yet another animal welfare petition put an end to the competition. But the hardy Niseachs, as they’re called, still hunt the guga, despite protests from the RSPB, SSPCA, Peta and the 80,000 folk who will sign the petition after someone sets one up after reading this.

When they are not hunting the gannet offspring, islanders also hanker to burn policemen in huge wicker obelisks but, with the advent of social media, you can’t get away with that now. Traffic wardens are another story.

5 SOCIAL distancing means we can still take part in the burgeoning sport of haggis hurling.

The popularity of this event has spread to all of the parts of the globe where there are Scots ex-pats. This had it origins in the days when women folk would lob the haggis across rivers to their men working in the fields, who would have to catch them in their kilts, which kept the lunch from falling into

the dirt and also gave the ladies a quick flash.

Nowadays the rules have been simplified. After catching your haggis and killing it, the winner is the person who can throw it from the furthest distance into the bullseye, a cooking pot simmering on a camp fire, on a field marked like a target. There will probably be a petition about this too.

6 THEN there are the blackenings, not of the everyday sort on social media, but the kind of treatment that was meted out to collaborators in the war, if they were lucky, covering someone with soot, treacle, flour, oil and feathers, then tying them to a lamp post or bound to a tree in a park. This had become a lot easier since lockdown rules were eased and more households could mix.

It used to be a prenuptial ritual in places like Orkney, Aberdeenshire and Angus where the bride or groom was the victim, but as there has been so little outdoor activity permitted. It is so much

fun, if you are the blackener, it has now become commonplace to walk down a street and nod politely to a feathered friend affixed to a traffic light.

7 THIS started in the village of Kelty, in what used to be the Fife coalfield, and was a way of honouring the past before Maggie Thatcher removed all 14 pits. Competitors raced, for just short of a mile, uphill through the village with 25 kilos of nutty slack on their backs if they were women, and double that for men.

But to wokers, snowflakes and generation alphabet, coal has become environmental kryptonite, so substitutes had to be found in other parts of the country. It couldn’t be peat, because that’s another no-no, so now it’s environmentally-sourced and harvested rice or semolina cut by living wage employees driving carbon neutral combines.

8 IT was the custom that on the first day of May, early in the morning, women would rub their faces in the grass, believing that this dew, on this day, was better for the complexion than all the unguents and anti-ageing cream a chemist could concoct. This ritual has, of course, been largely replaced by Botox but is still practised widely and with the easing of travel restrictions is likely to be at a record this year, particularly in beer gardens.

Although it is possible the face down woman is there from the night before.

9 IN in pitching the the Park, absence tents revellers on of their festivals will own be like lawns T for T on the Green, sipping the brew under canvas and listening on the boom box to Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi. The supply of drugs may indeed be a problem.

10 BECAUSE of the above we will now enter a new lockdown before summer arrives.