(no subject)

[tree_and_leaf]

Oh yes: yesterday the Scottish government launched the Homecoming 2009 campaign, which I would be inclined to cast as a piece of towrist-oriented daftness, except that much as I hate to admit it, it actually does stir some sort of response in me, even as I groan at the slight whiff of shortbread'n'tartan. They do have some very nice e-cards with good pictures of Scotland - am especially pleased by the number of Common Riding* pictures, as there's a tendency for the Borders to be ignored.

And then of course there's the video, which involves a number of Scots celebrities singing, trying to sing, or in the case of Mr Connery, intoning, Caledonia. It has, I gather, been much mocked, and probably deservedly, though I think Connery gets away with it, just, by sheer force of Big Tam-ishness. At least with the straight female portion of the audience, anyway:

Though as far as the 'appealing to the sentimental longings of the exile' goes, it can't beat the famous Tennants "Caledonia" ad, which legend has it was strongly objected to by the Scottish Tories as being likely to send the SNP vote up:

(The whole advert is quite cunningly keyed into a whole set of Scottish images of ourselves and of others, specifically London, the big bad city, where you may get on economically, but will never be at home, though there is a hint of ambivalence in the last shot of - presumably - the Girl He Left Behind Him in the Smoke. Notice that not only are the Edinburgh scenes characterised either by space or by happy people, the returning prodigal apparently stops to buy a Big Issue before heading into the pub - that's quite revealing of Scottish myths about themselves: we like to tell ourselves that we're all Jock Tamson's bairns, and there is a tendency to believe that we're better at solidarity than the English.)

Actually, though, the Frank Miller version the ad used is far inferior to the original, as sung by Dougie Maclean:

I'm not sure what these songs sound like to someone who isn't Scottish, but they do, I think, speak quite powerfully to the anxieties of people in the diaspora (especially when you listen to the full version) - no-one forced us to leave, but the tug of home remains, as does the fear of the loss of identity, of roots, of connectedness.


* I once read a very stupid book which argued that Common Ridings were a demonstration of Protestant chauvinism, a la the Orange Walk. This is absurd - there are a lot of different strands in the Common Riding tradition, and the precise combination varies from place to place, but none of them are enthusiastically Protestant. Hawick is frankly pagan, while the good burghers of Lauder proudly follow a blue banner with a picture of Our Lady on it, which you don't generally see Orangemen doing.

Comments

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

I really, really like the shortbread. Mmmmm.

[tree_and_leaf]

It is quite tasty shortbread, yes!

[wychwood]

What's the musical tag at the end of the Homecoming 2009 video? I think know it, but I can't pin it down...

I do like that song; I first heard it done by the house band at my local folk club, Mad Jocks and Englishmen *g*.

[tree_and_leaf]

I can't, either. The first few notes sound like "Mull of Kintyre", and then it sounds a bit like the Ashokan Farewell (which is American-pseudo Irish). It may, I suppose, just be Generic Celtic Pipe Music.

That's a marvellous name for a folk club.

[wychwood]

Ah, I think it was the "Mull of Kintyre" that was catching my ear.

Sadly that was only the name of the band, not the club *g*. The club was (is!) the Red Lion Folk Club, because that's the name of the pub where it's based. The band were great, though - two Scots and a Brummie, lots of excellent music.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

I'm already there! Yay!

*tries to be more Scottish*

[tree_and_leaf]

*is a bit envious*

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I must remember to look up what Ronald Hutton says about Common Riding - the Northumberland counterpart is Riding the Bounds, principally at Berwick, though it does happen elsewhere, often as a modern invention (such as the Riding the Bounds of the Civil Parish of Ponteland, which would take place in the 1980s).

[tree_and_leaf]

Common Ridings, if not quite a modern invention, were of course revived - though at Lauder, at least, there were still people alive who remembered them from their childhood.

The Lauder Common Riding seems to have been originally connected with the Ascension of the BVM (Lauder being on the pilgrimage route to St Mary's Haddington). Hence the incredibly Mariological town coat of arms - one does rather wonder how that went down at various points in time, though suspect that the answer was simply that local patriotism trumped Protestantism...

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Hutton misses Common Riding entirely, though he does mention Hawick a couple of times in the context of Shrovetide town football matches and the perpetuation of the midsummer fires despite the disapproval of the Kirk.

As for what I make of the videos, now I've seen them... the reported Scottish Conservative complaints about the Tennents Caledonian ad surely show why that party is not the force it was half a century ago in Scottish politics, and how unipolar its sense of Britishness had become. The current Homecoming campaign's video was the most affecting because it gave me a sense of a Scottishness from which I'm excluded on the grounds that I don't recognize the majority of the celebrities, trite and 2000s-ish as that may seem, distinct from the fact that I was born sixty miles or so outside Scotland. My claims to be part of the diaspora are remote, but I also thought of that great-grandmother born in Ecclefechan, and the more remote ancestors on my mother's side whose early nineteenth-century census entries described them as born in 'Scotland' whereas locations in England and Wales were known by county.

[tree_and_leaf]

Well, some of them are a bit obscure, though I could at least guess who most of them were:

Amy Macdonald (singer, not a very exciting one); Chris Hoy (only identified him by the number of medals!); Brian Cox; Sam Torrance; Eddi Reader; Thom Evans and Kelly Brown (rugby players, for Glasgow - I had no idea who they were); Sean Connery; Lulu.

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

*is hypnotised by the Connery eyebrow*

[tree_and_leaf]

... yes. It does that.

[sacred-sarcasm.livejournal.com]

I misread that as 'Tennant's Caledonia Ad', which would certainly have encouraged me to go to Scotland ;)

This sort of thing always makes me sad I was brought up in Berkshire with no... it's not fair to say 'no culture' but I don't get that heart-clutchy feel of 'home' when I go back to Wokingham. (Funnily, I do get it for Cumbria, where my parents moved when I was at university)

[tree_and_leaf]

I'm quite surprised that they didn't rope D.T. in, but perhaps he ran away too fast ;)

I'm not sure why Berkshire should be like that - perhaps too close to London to retain it's own particularity? Of course, there's a good deal of sentimental nonsense talked about Scotland at times, but on the whole I think we're lucky to have a strong sense of where we're from.

[sacred-sarcasm.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are bits of Berkshire that are very home-ish, still (ETA: not for me, because I didn't grow up there, but in a 'rooted' sort of way). But mainly country/farmland and the downs and the Ridgeway and Wayland Smithy and all that. Not little market towns that have been swallowed up by Reading!

I think part of it was being middle class and not living in the countryside, if that makes sense. It's hard to feel attached to a little bit of suburbia. And although my parents both grew up where I grew up, there were never any stories (well, yes, stories, but about how mum pulled my uncle along that road on his skates, not how Merlin is asleep in that hill there). I found a good substitute when I went up to Oxford, funnily enough. And something about hills has always got to me, though Wokingham's flat as flat can be.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, suburbia can be pretty deadly; I must admit that I've always felt that the Borders, where my mother is from and where my granddad spent all his life, feels much more like 'my country' than where I grew up, though I've never actually lived in the Borders (though I have spent quite a lot of time there).

[owl]

Speaking as a third-generation descendent of the diaspora, it still works. Although I suspect that part of the effectiveness is the longing to have somewhere where I belong unambiguously, to imagine going home to. Because I'm not Scottish, (or English or Welsh, and who's British?), and yet I'm not really Irish either.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I was very much brought up to be 'British', and always felt so, though the longer I live in the south of England the more 'English' I feel...

[tree_and_leaf]

Which suggests that there is still something in the theory that it was mostly people from the margins of Britain - in the weird perspective that everything that isn't the South is marginal - who were invested in Britishness (used to be the case in Scotland, but this was is largely no longer true).

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Charles Phythian-Adams's chapter in Northumbria: History and Identity AD 547-2000 applies a theory he's no doubt expressed elsewhere - that there are three Britains, 'archipelago' (Scotland, Wales, Ireland [insofar as it is 'British'] and the northernmost counties of England - Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland - plus Cornwall), 'continental' (England south-east of the Severn-Wash line) and 'littoral' (the rest of England). The further away from continental Britain one goes, the greater the appreciation of pluralities of identity.

[tree_and_leaf]

An interesting theory; the Lakes and Northumberland certainly don't feel alien in the way that, say, Oxfordshire does (I mean, I like Oxfordshire. It's just other). I admit that I know the Lakes quite well, so it's not really a fair test - but that doesn't go for Northumberland, other than Berwick, which in some ways is a special case.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I remember a non-LJ veteran taruithornite, originally from Ohio, who migrated from Oxford to Edinburgh and on a return visit said how different it was from 'England' and how she had been converted to Scottish nationalism as a result. I replied that if she had grown up in the north-east of England she might see things differently; sometimes when in Edinburgh I almost feel that I am home, but more so.