tree_and_leaf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tree_and_leaf) wrote2009-01-26 12:04 pm
tree_and_leaf) wrote2009-01-26 12:04 pm
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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.
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.
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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...
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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.
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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.