Of bagpipes and other foul habits

News from Scotland that the kilt is to make a comeback as a “symbol of Scottish pride” will raise more than a few laughs around certain public houses I know in Dublin. They will be merry in the Derry, levitated in the Liffey Arms, at the thought that the Scots have been sold the same pup a second time around.

The information this week from Edinburgh said the revival of the kilt had come about as the result of a “growing roots mania” among the Scottish nation.

Being part-Irish, part-Scots, part-English but mostly South African, I am often at odds with “root” feelings. A great grand-uncle on my mother’s side was one Thomas Pringle, an 1820 Settler Scot, who wrote poetry and also did something on local newspapers. Before my time.

My father always believed he was born in County Clare. After his death, I found documentation in Somerset House which showed he was not the pure-bred Irish peasant he prided himself on being.

Just before his birth, his family moved to Cheapside in London which (technically at least) made my father a Cockney. I don’t know how he would have responded to that revelation.

If I could have chosen my own antecedence, I wouldn’t mind being a bit Welsh as well. For a while, I lived in South Wales, dispensing beer in a pub called the Taffs Well Inn. The Welshmen I came to know were a total contradiction of the national caricature. They were stalwart, phlegmatic, humorous, healthily cynical.

“Think you could squeeze a large whisky into that pint of wallop, boyo?” “Certainly, sir.” “Well, fill the bloody glass up then!”

Or: “You got a ladder around here, Springbok?” “What for, Mr Jones?” “To get down to the level of my bloody beer!”

One old regular got stung in the summer trying to remove a bee from his mild-and-bitter. “H’mm,” he remarked. “Warm feet, them bees!”

Now the Welsh would never be seen dead in a kilt.

The Irish, of course, wore kilts long before the Scots. Then they realised what a foolish spectacle they were making of themselves and traded the habit across the Irish Sea. Thereafter, they did the same thing with the bagpipes.

It is a sociological fact that Scotsmen past and present have tended, and do tend, to immigrate more than any other nation – the Lebanese notwithstanding. I do not find that surprising.

If I were a member of a tribe that required grown men to bare their legs in public, devour (and consider a special treat) puddings made of sheep’s entrails, make cacophonous noises on pigs’ bladders and wear their handbogs in silly places, I would also seriously think of going away.

What Brendan Behan, that outrageous Irishman, thought of kilts may not be quoted in a family newspaper. But he once said of the bagpipes:  “The only good thing about them is that they don’t smell too.”

Someone told me, or else I read, that the bagpipes were actually invented by the Berbers. If so, the Berbers are being very quiet on the subject. Not that I blame them. It isn’t the sort of achievement a nation should bandy about.

Ah, I hear you cry, but the Scots have at least given something of value to the world. Fine Scotch whisky!

Another recent item in the overseas Press, pertinent to this little treatise, announces that the Scottish Football League will celebrate the start of the Cup Final by exploding a 15-inch shell packed with Bell’s whisky miniatures above the crowd at the stadium.

A nice gesture, you might say, all those bottles of the national elixir raining down on football fans, supporting the best traditions of soccer hooliganism.

The only point I would add is that the company which produces Bell’s whisky now belongs to the Irish firm of Guinness!

The laird giveth and the laird taketh away.

John Ryan’s Midweek column.Of