Your Childhood Memories of Scotland?

[Bugbear]

If you wish, share some of your favorite childhood memories of Scotland; your stories of growing up in Scotland.

Thank you.

[BonnetMaker]

Not so much childhood as a teenage memory, I spent a week at a time three summers running sailing in the Firth of Clyde with a load of friends and a retired navy commander.

Essentially it boiled down to us sailing between all the distilleries and him doing the cooking Always fabulous trips, the weather always seemed to be perfect for the Burnt Islands and Kyles of Bute which remain in my memory of some of the most beautiful places to moor up of a night.

[Bugbear]

Thanks BonnetMaker.
I fear I have lost my topic fu, not that it was strong fu.

I had considered starting a thread asking about Scottish children's tree houses, but decided to widen the topic.

[Lallans]

That's easy, I have plenty of Scottish memories as long as I don't actualy have to have been in Scotland: Stories about the lousy weather. The strange tendency of visiting relatives to eat toffee at all hours, wrapped toffee which they could magically produce out of any one of 18 pockets. A TV cartoon on the legend of the ant and the grasshopper where the ant was a Scottish accented creature in a bonnet, kilts, and a super-crooked walking stick. Mutterings- threats- about how Christmas was not observed in Scotland and it didn't have to be here either.

[Bugbear]

Did you have a tree house?

[Lallans]

No but we would cut down the trees and make forts. Massive structures probably six feet across, I mean the forts. None of this was in Scotland.

[Bugbear]

Ya Canuck of NI, we had forts, but they were more or less carved out as clearings in the thorn bushes and such growing everywhere. There were trees here and there, but we had mainly fields and thorn bushes.
Scottish cartoon ant, that's kind of funny.


I'm getting the feeling the Scots really aren't interested in this thread, or perhaps are offended by it. Sorry about that.

[Lallans]

Ya Canuck of NI, we had forts, but they were more or less carved out as clearings in the thorn bushes and such growing everywhere. There were trees here and there, but we had mainly fields and thorn bushes.
Scottish cartoon ant, that's kind of funny.


I'm getting the feeling the Scots really aren't interested in this thread, or perhaps are offended by it. Sorry about that.

Cartoon was from the Depression era. Fable was by Aesop I believe. The Bugs Bunny Scot, who ran after every bullet he fired, came into my life at least 10 years later, when backwoods TV channels had more budget. I miss the ant, haven't seen that one for decades and decades.

[Bugbear]

Cartoon was from the Depression era. Fable was by Aesop I believe. The Bugs Bunny Scot, who ran after every bullet he fired, came into my life at least 10 years later, when backwoods TV channels had more budget. I miss the ant, haven't seen that one for decades and decades.

Yep, "The Ants and the Grasshopper" is in there.
Aesop's Fables: A New Revised Version From Original Sources, at Project Gutenberg
* From the link:

The Ants and the Grasshopper.

The Ants were employing a fine winter's day in drying grain collected in the summer time. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The Ants inquired of him: "Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?" He replied: "I had not leisure; I passed the days in singing." They then said: "If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter."

[Lallans]

The cartoon in question went something like this: the grasshopper spends the summer loafing and playing the fiddle while the ant is working, growing and storing food and building a house etc. When winter comes the grasshopper is seen outside starving and freezing while the ant is sitting on a rocking chair in front of a warm fire. He looks out his window and sees the grasshopper and says something to the effect of "Tough nuts, you stupid grasshopper! I warned ye!" And that was the end, but you could tell things would not go well for the grasshopper after that. They just don't make cartoons like that any more- now the grasshopper gets half the food, free housing, and the ant has to pay for his medical care.