Warning! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!
This is one of my long discursive posts. It was prompted by an exchange elsewhere about what the most Scottish thing about Scotland is. In the midst of yet another bout of insomnia, the question returned to me and an answer and a set of reasons that were a voicing of many of my tropes and obsessions emerged. And so you, if you choose, get to read what that was – but you are forewarned.
Growing up in the West of Scotland, I was often not entirely sure of my nationality. First there’s weirdness that is British, or as it should be UKish, something I’ve never felt despite it undoubtedly being my cultural reference. Then Scottish, which in part felt but it competed, due to family connections, and the savage influence of sectarianism, with Irish. My maternal grandparents had been born in Ireland, and with visits there on holiday at an early age, the LPs of Irish songs in the house (which were hidden away by my mother when the troubles began their bloody flowering), and the tricolour and Soldier’s Song at Parkhead when I started going to football matches, the emotional attachment grew.
Oddly enough any real belief in either of those bonds seemed to begin to fade when I gave up supporting Celtic to become more precisely local in my football support. Having watched the buses go to Ibrox one week, and then been in the buses to Parkhead the next, I found it suddenly strange that there was another local team that wasn’t supported. Once I started going to Morton, the lack of expectation, and the lack of constant rivalry, St, Mirren never really counts, the enjoyment of supporting a team and not hating another made a move to a less deep affection for nationality seemed natural. That was combined with a growing knowledge that the Irish/Scottish, Catholic/Protestant dualities were not really about separation but an emphasis on tiny imagined differences. My grandparents, though Irish, boasted incredibly Scottish names, at least one of which would be thought of as more likely Protestant, in Campbell and Forsyth. The names, witness to the intertwined, interbred, and even sometimes, despite the hatred, intermarried history of the two countries. None of that knowledge was derived from schools history, which other than the mirroring of Elizabeth the first of England, and Mary, Queen of Scots, and the following union of the crowns under James, was bereft of anything that was Scottish.
So when I considered the question, it was with an ambivalence that I don’t really care much for nationality. I can’t escape some of it and I feel deep unease that I still have that deep atavistic surge of pleasure when Scotland beats England at sport, even if it’s only rugby. And yet there was one thing that far and above anything else is Scottish about Scotland, and that is whisky.
It is above all our global brand, drunk widely and admired and imitated. It is known as Scotch, which even as the knee jerk objection to the term when it is used for people emphasises that brand and that linking. Alcohol is often a brand for other nations, vodka in spirits, French wine but nothing else has that link. We even have another national drink, which has its own links to whisky with a fiery taste, and a vibrant version of the colour, the orange ginger of youth as opposed to the gentler russet of age.
Even more than the global reach, it is also something that marks the geography of Scotland. The brandy of France does not show the link that its wine does, and the terroir of whisky terrorise brandy as a symbol of a nation. The range of whiskies and spread is incredible, and it achieves the rare linking of the Highlands and Lowlands, and a much rarer link with the islands. I mapped the islands of Scotland by drinking the whiskies before ever visited the places, and some such as Highland Park are well kent, while their homes are still terra incognita. Islay seems to echo the spread of whiskies in Scotland with its difference in tastes crammed into a Scottish El Dorado.
Nothing could be the most Scottish thing if it did not show the Caledonian antisyzygy, the duality that haunts everything. Whisky is both an item of beauty, but the symbol of the weakness we have for alcohol. It’s far from the only drink that we use to kill ourselves but it alone is seen as an art as well, as something drunk in the grandest of circumstances with awe at its complexity, costing more than its weight is gold or oil at its zenith. Yet still, it is the drink that wee old men drank in pubs in their ‘a hauf an a hauf’s where the duality of Scotland in a drink order.
Culturally its reach is far wider than just the nights in the pub or the corridors of power. The antisyzygy in some of great works of Scottish literature, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which show the dangers of what happens when the other of us is let out by whatever means including the quaffing of a specific cordial, is that of our relationship with drink and behaviour. And just look at Tam O’Shanter with its drouthy neebours, the drunk man looking at the thistle by McDiarmid who outlined the idea of the duality, the joy and depression of Whisky Galore. Even the very price of the drink is memorialized in ‘Twelve an a tanner a bottle’ a complaint against the excise duty and the excise man who is the creature of the devil, and as in the song of my loved city, when I have those couple of drinks on a Saturday, Glasgow belongs to all of us but there is till the underthread of violence.
An objection to the embodiment of Scottishness by whisky is in so much of the above there is no mention of woman. The characters and singers are all men. When I tried to think of a well known woman whisky drinker, the only one that arose was Margaret Thatcher, whose relationship with the Scots is not the most positive, Yet behind that duality are the battered wives, and skelpt weans, and history and culture across most of the world are male dominated. It also allows me to flag the story in the link below for anyone who hasn’t seen it, of one woman’s role n spreading the brand of whisky to one of its most important markets.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-30682239The original discussion that triggered this meandering had someone arguing for Gaelic as being the most Scottish thing. One friend was pointing out what to me is the undeniable fact that for most of us in Scotland, Gaelic is not much more than odd train signs, Amongst the very few words of Gaelic that people in most of Scotland might know is
uisge beatha, the words for whisky, from which the word whisky derives. It takes Gaelic, and Scottish to the world, it sums up the light and darkness that is us. In that sense it is not just Scottish, it is a summary of humanity but then we are all Jock Tamson’s bairns.
