What brought you to wearing a kilt?

[Ancienne Alliance]

I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer 3 years ago. It's a nasty one with only 5 year survival rate of 30%. I went through chemo and am now in remission.

Not knowing how much time I had left, I started thinking about things that I wanted to do before heading to that great kilted party in the sky.

One thing I did was buy a 1969 Plymouth GTX like the one I had back in the day. The wife and I dated when I had that car and we are now having tons of fun with it.

My maternal grandmother was born in Scotland of the clan MacKay. That started the ball rolling. It was something I wanted to do and if you wait too long, sometimes you never get the chance.

Kilted and loving it!!

Great story. I hope you are well and happy.


Best,

Robert

[O'Callaghan]

I started wearing sarongs at new age events that my wife likes to go to, at her suggestion, but I have this problem with wearing anything that long. I tend to step on the hem!

Some of the guys at these events wore kilts, which seemed more practical, but my problem with that was that I'm not remotely Scottish. Eventually I came across the notion of Irish kilts, and I certainly do have Irish blood, and I also discovered cheap kilts made in Pakistan. So, the first kilt I bought was in Irish Natonal tartan.

I have acquired a couple more kilts since then, in County Cork tartan and in solid black. However, I also became aware that the heyday of Irish kilts was the 19th century and the early 20th, and that they wore either plain green or plain saffron kilts, whereas Irish tartans are mainly a postwar phenomenom and mostly worn by Irish Americans, whilst designed by the same or by English and Scottish woolen mills. Whilst I now live in the USA, I am one of your London Irish, so not actually an Irish American.

So, I have ordered a solid green kilt, and we know that something like that would have been worn by some of the men involved in the Easter Rising, when not actually fighting the Brits (I get a bit schizophrenic on that subject, as a Brit of Irish extraction). It will be more authentically Irish, although to some extent perhaps less like what people expect a kilt to look like.