Send In The Clowns

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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.