I Belong To Glasgow

I spent last weekend in Glasgow watching tourists climb my parents’ mountains of Easter Eggs. I think the Easter bunny must at least have a holiday home in my mum and dad’s garden along with all the baby Easter bunnies, and their cousins, aunties, uncles and step children twice removed. Mum’s lounge resembles Willy Wonka’s present cupboard.

She has no discipline whatsoever when it comes to chocolate so eats her Easter eggs straight away while dad usually leaves his for a few weeks till she’s finished and then teases her by eating his very slowly in front of her. She got her own back last year by eating his eggs from the back, apart from the small visible bit that pokes through the cardboard at the front. She had glued that in place so that he wouldn’t suspect.

The Scots have a tradition I haven’t seen in England of rolling hard bloiled eggs down a hill on Easter Monday and then eating them, and I’m surprised it hasn’t become a delicacy in Scottish restaurants to remind us all of childhood – Bolied Eggs Froid served with Grass and Broken Shell and the odd bit of Dog Poo.

There’s something strange about going home to the area where you grew up and remembering long forgotten traditions. Football pitches where I kicked a ball, and trees where I once climbed, now look much smaller of course, buildings have sprung up and roads appeared that weren’t there before. But what I really noticed this time was the pace of life was so much slower and more relaxed. London, without warning, seems to have turned me in to a speed freak where actually just doing nothing hasn’t been an option for a long time.

Sure, people drive more slowly in Glasgow, but I think there might be a reason for that. The roads there resemble the floor of a badly maintained quarry that has been bombed and then attacked by an army of tarmac eating ants with pickaxes and hungry bellies. Forget going to Alton Towers or Disneyland. You want a bumpy, screaming, rollercoaster ride? Drive on any main road in Glasgow. You can make it more exciting by flying the flag of England and weaving in and out of traffic shouting “Bring Back Maggie”.

But this slower pace of life thing is more than just speed on side streets. People take time to talk to each other, even strangers.

Beside me at the supermarket, the checkout girl looked at the woman behind me and said “That’s a load of stuff you’ve got there. Having a party?”. The answer was “No, it’s pie day.” Now pie day was not a tradition I remembered at all but it seemed a great idea – every one gets a shortcrust treat for their dinner, maybe a nice steak and kidney followed by an apple and blackcurrant? As I listened closely it turned out that I simply hadn’t adjusted to the dialect yet. This woman confessed she gets “pied every Friday as Friday is pie day”, and it was then I realised she meant “pay day”. But I still think pie day is a better idea.

As my mum and dad are a bit hard of hearing, their TV has the subtitles on permanently and whoever invented speech recognition software for television certainly wasn’t a Scotsman. As one Glasgow reporter with a broad accent asked the Prime Minister if the election was all about “the cuts”, the subtitles informed us it was “all about the cats” which, again, seems a great idea. Watching football on Sunday the commentator shouted “Celtic and Rangers are desperate for goals” but the subtitles told us they were “desperate for golf”. And the accent is catching. I have come back to London sounding like the love child of Susan Boyle and Kenny Dalglish.

While my garden in London basked in tropically hot, sunny weather over the weekend, I was enjoying the tradition of cloud and a bit of rain in Glasgow, and it may sound that with the clapped out roads and the rotten weather I wish I’d stayed home in London. But no.

For all its faults Glasgow will always be home, and if I eventually move back there I’m going to set myself up in business as a road repairer. That way I’ll have enough millions in the bank not just to escape to somewhere warm on holiday, I will be able to buy the sun outright and rent it out.

Send In The Clowns

www.paulcoia.com

As a proud native of Glasgow, one time city of culture and now the Woolworths of riverside real estate, I’ve long enjoyed the fun to be had in a Scottish sport which is enjoyed by everyone. It is not tossing the caber, but hurling the insult.

Alan McGee, former manager of the band Oasis and pal of Tony Blair, used his Glasgow upbringing this week when asked what he thought of the Prime Minister. “Gordon Brown”, he said “has had a charisma bypass. His party are cretins and retards.” Contrast this with London’s, very English, mayor Boris Johnson who said that Gordon Brown is “like some sherry crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver”. More polite, for sure, but less of a direct hit than McGee’s barbs.

Scottish humour is based on cruelty but also applauding when you get bigger and better thrown back. We’re not sophisticated, and a poster advertising a play about Glasgow summed it up as the city where “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are still throwing spears at buses.”

Meeting some gas bag, who simply opens their mouth to boast, might lead English people like Stephen Fry to say a clever and enduringly whimsical remark such as “You have the patter of tiny feats” but in Glasgow it’s more likely that Stevie Fryup would say “That’s clever, the way your lips move but your bum does the talking”. It then becomes a contest with the reply being something like “At least I’m not wearing mine on my shoulders”.

We don’t do subtlety in Glasgow, preferring to hit the bullseye first time, and when I visited the city recently and was recognised in the street, a woman said “I used to look forward to seeing your face on my telly every day.” Then with a sly smile she added, “As soon as you came on I knew it was time to turn over for Countdown”.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re no repecters of celebrity. When Bono played Glasgow with his band U2 and movingly snapped his fingers every three seconds saying that a child was dying in Africa on every click, an audience member shouted “well stop clicking then”.

So are we Scots just simply rude? I hope it’s more than that. Sir Alex Ferguson, now manager of Manchester United, tells the story of his playing days with Glasgow Rangers and going in to see the then manager Scott Symon to ask why he had been playing in the second team for three weeks. Mr Symon replied with the perfect put down, “because we don’t have a third team”. Ferguson, the target of the comment, just laughed.

Scottish football has a sense of humour deadlier than a teenager’s socks, where hopeless goalkeepers are known as Michael Jackson - because they wear gloves for no apparent reason - useless players are said to be “the biggest waste of money since Paris Hilton bought pyjamas”, and I remember when Scotland lost to Denmark in the Mexican World Cup our supporters summoned up their vast knowledge of world events and current affairs, aligned with their powers of creative writing and word play, and chanted, “you can stick your streaky bacon up you’re a*se”. Now that’s class.

So why am I going on about being Scottish? Well I guess it’s because my kids keep telling me that the longer I live in London the less Scottish I’m becoming by the day and, this week, they said I’m turning English. Apparently I said the word ‘filthy’ rather than my usual ‘manky’. Unless you’ve had acid injected into your veins whilst coating your eyeballs with chilli powder, or you have bought Des O’Connor’s new Christmas album, you cannot appreciate the level of pain I feel when I hear that. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being English, indeed some of my best wives have been English, but rather that there’s everything wrong with forgetting where you come from.

I know it’s not my accent that’s changed as an internet chat board currently has a comment saying they hate my Scottish voice on radio and always switch over – I wonder if it’s that Countdown fan from Glasgow again – and when I went to see England play Australia at Twickenham two weeks ago I sang the Australian anthem to deflate the auld enemy. It seems to me my Scottish bloody mindedness is still intact.

I wonder, though, if it all matters anyway. It seems that wherever we live we’re all starting to blend more and more in to one homeless waif as quick communications and ease of travel mean we spend more time picking up other cultures and accents, and my kids seem to now talk an American street language that is part “Yo girlfriend” and part indecipherable.

In the quiet road of eleven houses where I live we have three German families, one French and two Far Eastern. There is also a Danish family who are renting, though what they do with streaky bacon must remain a mystery as I’ve yet to meet them. But I’m sure we’d all get along famously as nationality seems to me to be less an issue than ever before.

So forget common currencies, Central Banks, European Unions, Nato and cultural exchange trips. Togetherness in daily life is us all just getting along despite where we come from, and laughing at ourselves. When we get to the stage of Glasgow humour being used commonly, without anyone taking offence, I think we’ll have truly arrived.