Wearing the kilt in Scotland

[Ron Abbott]

The Scotland many of you think you know or believe to be.....is sometimes just not the reality.

Whilst those in the new world think of ancestry and tartan and the thing called the clan, of mountains and heather and some romanticised characters in books, how many of you would actually give up your present way of life to return to the 'auld country' to live?

How many of you have been to Pilton, Niddrie, Craigmillar or Easterhouse?
How many have seen the bigotry in the likes of West Lothian or Glasgow around the 12th July?

I'm also disgusted with what happened in St Andrews, as aforementioned; but just how many are aware that St Andrews University is seen as being a choice destination for students from England? It is seen by some as a haven for the English middle-class, 'can't get into Oxbirdge set' I'm not making excuses for the sort of behaviour described, it's disgraceful and embarrassing, but these things do happen all over the place and Scotland is not exempted.

When Jock Scot mentions the fairytale world that is Scotland, maybe he has hit the nail on the head.
There those that do indeed picture Scotland as some sort of fairytale world......talk about going back to romanticise over the auld country and all that. But the fact is that Scotland is not that place. It's a real place, with warts and all and needless-to-say, the natives don't see things the same way....and in some instances don't see those coming to visit from the new world as long lost cousins, but merely as cash cows and as people whose ancestors gave up on their homeland for whatever reason. Some considered honorable, some not.

But for those who do live in Scotland, Jock has it again. If I think back to school days, there were kids in my year whose surnames were of Chinese, Pakistani, Indian, German-Jewish and especially of Italian origin. I never once thought of any of them as anything but Scots and to to this day I keep in touch with one of them......whose ancestors came from Italy to Edinburgh around WW1 and I certainly have never heard him calling himself anything but Scots and yet knows his own ancestry and has pride in it.