Wake up Alex – he’s taking the mick

I mean strange, unusual, exceptional. Then I struggle to imagine another national community, anywhere, that has co-operated so willingly in its own rebranding as the Scots. We are the only people to possess a smart word for humiliation. A brand is not a handbag, or designer specs. It’s a hot iron on your hide, something planted on the herd. Or – if madam prefers – a cute plaid imprint on the flesh. Available as a tea towel.

Tartan is a thing Scots allowed when they had a stab at becoming North Britons. They thereafter chose to believe that some German butchers – they happened to be German – had been among us “for 1,000 years”. And that, bairn, is how the clans died.

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, our only great man, had a couple of quirks. One was an insistence, always, on precision. Louis would not let a word get by without a fight. When one of his Victorian groupies sought to send a letter care of “North Britain”, Lou answered: “The name of my native land is not North Britain, no matter the name of yours.”

Still: RLS in a kilt? Me in a kilt? All of us parading through New York bekilted in some gaudy imperialist version of cute ethnic? Who’s keen? Who’s up for that? Personally, I’ll be busy.

Back in the 1980s, when the great Murray Grigor created an art event around these notions of tartan, kitsch, tourism, Scotland, and – what’s the word? – crap, our excuse for a political class were not paying attention. Tartanry, Scotch Myths, and the rest, had yet to become an argument.

But we all knew, queasily, that putting on trews, or a sash, or a sporran, involved a certain amount of – do the French have a word for this? – baggage. We all knew, somehow, that none of this was real, that in Highlands or Islands, Lowland or the housing scheme bogland, it was a kind of lie. And we still do.

You can mount an address to the condition of Scotland, in Douglas Dunn’s exquisite fashion. You can tell them where to stick their kilts. You can dress up for the football in your Braveheart costume. You can write to complain about the Hogmanay telly. You can defend every last inch of the beautiful dirt because it is incomparable and irreplaceable. To all of the foregoing: me too.

But we conspire, all of us, in two lies. First, that we are fringe European peasants. Secondly, that we peasants – aspiring to become a modern ­peasant economy, etcetera, and so forth – must always take the first offer on the table. And then stick on a kilt.

So where – since this newspaper is a little dull concerning expletives – does that leave Scotland and Mr Donald Trump? The First Minister has already done all the grovelling that can decently be done, on our behalf. Aberdeenshire Council, when not busy ripping the heart from its own town, has been mopping – Kleenex is always handy, colleagues – the spillage.

But here’s the definite article; the Donald. He has not quite got absolutely everything his own way. The boy isn’t too pleased, therefore. What he cannot purchase, he insults. He says pigsty; he says slum. The adjectival answers I don’t hear are the ones not coming from the community of Scotland.

Full Story: The Herald Scotland