Categories: random
Date: 10 March 2006 12:52:19
One thing that anyone who's been in Scotland more than, ooh, about 10 seconds cannot fail to notice is that there is a very strong and pronounced cultural identity, with lots of visible (and audible) signs of this. And lots of these cultural signs have been exported, exaggerated, changed and laughed at over the years, particularly south of the border. When I moved here there were a number of things I didn't expect to see or hear, as I just assumed it was cliche rather than fact (much like, for example, City gents wearing bowler hats). However, in the last couple of weeks I've seen and heard a couple of things which made me laugh as they were so cliched:
Firstly, in the queue at the chemists, the woman in front of me had had a particularly complicated shopping basket which had required quite a lot of assistance from the assistant. When she'd got everything sorted out and paid for, she said her thanks, and then as she was walking away said "Bye, the noo!" I honestly thought the only time I'd ever hear "the noo" was when my English friends practice their Scottish accents to wind me up, but no, I heard it with my own ears from a gen-u-ine local.
Then, I was parking my car outside the Stately Pile, when an older man walked past, wearing a tartan flat cap with a red bobble on top. Sadly he didn't have fake ginger hair attached to the cap, but even still I sat in the car thinking "you're not really wearing that!"