Tag Archives: Aberdeen

A Stateless Nation

01/11/2012 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

On growing up in the nationalist heartlands of the North East of Scotland and with parents of Anglo-Irish descent, I am a first generation Scot. Always sensitive to any hint of anti-English sentiment, I remember my first impressions of nationalism and I considered it back then to be inherently nasty, bigoted and deeply parochial. Largely this was a result of a feral loathing of the English football team and the hysterical fear of the ‘auld enemy’ winning the World Cup. Laughable as this might sound to educated observers, especially anyone who knows anything about football, the populist cry was that ‘we would never hear the end of it’ and they are right. It would be absolutely unbearable but our European partners usually come to our aid whenever this is in danger of happening.

Football might seem frivolous to some but the social consequences of this nationalist hysteria led to me preferring the union. As a result and unaware of the grim economic conditions taking place outside of the affluent fields of Aberdeenshire, I felt very comfortable being simultaneously Scottish and British. While I always considered myself Scottish, I owed my existence to parents and as a son of economic migrants; I was a product of oil rather than the Mearns soil.

Although looking back my British identity crisis was an emotional form of solidarity with my parents. It co-existed with my Scottish identity, which back then was a geographical and localised phenomenon. T.C. Smout, the brilliant social historian, once stated that ‘what is unusual about Scotland is the widespread acceptance that national identity does not have to coincide with state identity’. He succinctly tapped into the political separation of powers of the 1707 Union settlement, where Scottish cultural and religious nationalism was allowed to flourish outside the sphere of the British state.

Shaped by the desire to secure a Hanoverian Protestant succession in the early eighteenth century, British identity has been formed around the crown, empire, industrialisation and the emotional solidarity of two World Wars. In the twenty-first century, the contemporary framework of British identity has shifted radically. With the British Empire now confined to the dust columns of history, the BBC, NHS, Royal Mail and celebrity television shows such as the X-Factor and Big Brother provide ‘Britons’ with a shared cultural identity.

On being entirely comfortable with being both Scottish and British, I can trace my slow conversion to independence from attending two of Scotland’s oldest universities. On first attending Kings College in Aberdeen, I took great pride in learning that until 1858 Aberdeen had two universities, the same number as the whole of England. Education always appeared to be a great Scottish virtue and with the devolved Scottish administration paying student’s tuition fees since 1999 it became clear that education in Scotland is a universal right and not something confined to the privileged few.

On transferring to Glasgow University and studying History, I slowly developed the opinion that Scotland had everything in place to be thriving independent nation but somehow shied away from taking full responsibility. A country blessed with huge natural resources, a brilliant university network, untapped green energy, a booming tourist industry and two of the greatest cities in Northern Europe only 40 minutes apart. Scotland has enormous potential to become a progressive and wealthy European state.

If Scotland were to vote for full independence in autumn 2014 then the British state will cease to exist but Britishness will not. Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes are still Scandinavian despite living in politically autonomous states. The Scandinavian nations co-operate on matters of shared national interest such as security, immigration, energy and tourism. There will be no custom officials and razed wire fences in Berwick-upon-Tweed or Gretna Green if Scotland were to go their own way. And by retaining the Queen as the head of state, the SNP have offered an olive branch to unionists uncomfortable with the pace of radical constitutional change.

With his High Excellency Alex Salmond at the helm in Holyrood anything now feels possible. A truly outstanding political operator, the SNP has been blessed with the most gifted political communicator in the British Isles since Tony Blair. Commanding over an extremely disciplined and ‘on message’ party, Alex Salmond is gradually persuading the Scottish people there is nothing that cannot be achieved by ourselves. On turning full circle I now believe in independence. The wheels of progress have been slow but the destination now feels inevitable.

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Let the Stories Begin

04/26/2011 By in Sport Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Most football fans experience the same numbing emptiness the weekend after the last game of the season. Despite anticipating it for months in advance, there is no solace when the day finally arrives. Waking up on a Saturday morning and realising you have absolutely nothing to do in the afternoon. Sunshine may be splitting through your curtains but gone are the brusque talk shows, lunchtime games, fantasy football transfers, spread betting and laddish banter about the latest sexual shenanigans of Premiership footballers. Football sows a thread from a young age and while friends come and go, relationships collapse and society changes beyond recognition, the one consistency in a football fan’s life is the game itself.

On the eve of a Champions League semi-final, the same pulsating excitement will reach fever pitch across the world in another week of brilliant stories. Over the next two weeks football fans in England, Germany and Spain will undergo 180 minutes of unbridled joy, heart ache, anger and delirious portions of luck. However, the Champions League is an elitist competition reserved for the best clubs in the world. The majority of normal football fans support mediocre teams who rarely win trophies or achieve any noticeable success. Aberdeen FC are my home town club and my slavish devotion to football began inside the Merkland Road Stand at Pittodrie as a ten-year-old. Back in the early 1990s, Aberdeen were a well-respected European side renowned for playing attractive, expansive football with a squad of creative international players such as Hans Gillhaus, Charlie Nicholas and Jim Bett.

As a young teenager I watched my local side undergo a spectacular demise and everything about Scottish football is terrible now. Scotland’s favourite sport has become little more than a Glaswegian sectarian backwater. With rough pitches, bomb threats, empty stadiums, mediocre players, and racist and abusive chanting being churned out on a weekly basis. Scottish football is beyond shocking and is now little more than a byword for anti-social behaviour. On watching ESPN recently, I felt utterly demoralised seeing a dreadful Aberdeen side play what appeared to be different sport to what my father introduced to me in 1991. Much has changed since then and almost none of it has been for the better.

All I remember about my first game at Pittodrie is stepping inside an obscure granite stand and gasping at a jaw dropping display of 21, 600 red seats smothered in a veil of haar. From that day forth I became addicted to football and despite vastly increasing my knowledge of sport, people and life in general, when it really matters, the same excitable immaturity of wanting to win at all costs overcomes objectivity every time.

With every passing year, people should be able to put football into a balanced context and understand the warring tribal complexities, and cyclical nature of luck and success but nothing stops your visceral loathing of other team’s supporters. Inwardly I have lost count the number of times I have resorted to fist clenching Schadenfreude whenever a rival team has lost.

From buying a child’s ticket for £3.50 at Pittodrie to standing inside a North London gastro pub watching the world’s best footballers on a plasma 3D screen. The quality of football available has definitely increased over the last nineteen years but what remains constant is the same masochistic desire for glory. Every football fan is a living anthology, a composite of many selves, although the one constant throughout their lives will be the team(s) they support. This universal feeling is no better illustrated than waking up on a lazy summer morning and realising the one thing you always took for granted is now missing.

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The Binge Society

04/05/2011 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As the Scottish Government commit to plans for minimum pricing to tackle Scotland’s historic alcohol abuse problems. Glaswegian artist Kathyrn Rodger has explored the social mores of Scotland’s binge-drinking culture in her forthcoming Let Yourself Go exhibition, which focuses upon youthful hedonism and the need to escape. By evocatively capturing the feverish sensation of drunkenness, the Edinburgh College of Art student has cast a powerful lens upon the emotional and psychological effects of alcohol.

Letting off steam in a miserable climate is perfectly understandable and for two millenniums there has been a direct correlation between a lack of sunlight and excessive alcohol consumption. Although no one is really sure why this wet green island first developed a taste for booze. Bad weather is probably a good place to start and from the outset there have been two drinking cultures. Sunless nations such as Britain and Ireland adopted the Germanic model, where beverages based on grain were drunk away from the dining table. In the south Mediterranean they embraced the Roman model and offered children diluted wine at mealtimes instead.

Given the unique blend of dreary weather and social repression, the northern isles of Europe were almost destined to become the drunk men of Europe. Although many people will be surprised to learn that in 1970, the average Briton drank less than a third as much as the French or the Italians. But being unable to moderate her love of alcohol and the subsequent deregulation of previously strict temperance laws, Britain has now become the drinking capital of the world.

Spirits that once cost the equivalent of £45 in today’s market are now being sold in benevolent supermarket chains for little as £8.33 per bottle. As the liberalisation of the UK’s drinking laws continued throughout 1970s, the drinking rates in Britain have continued to soar and alcohol is 62% more affordable than in 1980. With super strength lagers and ciders available for the price of a chocolate bar, Britons are now able to ‘pre-load’ before ploughing fields in trashy night clubs such as the Shanghai Club in Edinburgh. Although you can’t blame the weather for all of the stab huts and fight clubs on the high street. As there is something psychologically wrong with a population that needs to get absolutely wasted before they start dancing.

Victim surveys show that roughly four in ten assaults now involve drinkers, and more than half of these incidents take place on a Friday and Saturday night. Anyone wading through a valley of chips, gravy and kebabs after a night out will relate to the horror of getting a late night bus home. Unable to make eye contact with your fellow drunken reprobates, the chances of leaving the bus with anything less than a violent hangover is very slim indeed.

Scotland’s top law officer Elish Angiolini has already predicted that the country is facing an alcoholic “apocalypse” from soaring drinking sales. And with the breweries continuing to be given a free reign over the UK drinking laws, the majority of British cities have failed to provide a sociable alternative to getting drunk. Deprived of sunlight and warmth for the majority of the year, it is perhaps understandable that citizens of this island let themselves go in the easiest manner available to them.

Britons will clearly continue to knock back supermarket booze unless prohibited to do otherwise. Although nothing has ever satisfactorily explained the extraordinarily high levels of violence associated with alcohol abuse in this country. Unpredictable weather patterns and seasonal affective disorder all seem to combine to make people more depressed in the north. And where better to illustrate our dysfunctional relationship with drinking than the Granite City. Situated in one of the most northernmost regions in Europe, it is a remote area but no different than any other British town when it comes to alcohol.

Aberdeen on a typical Saturday night usually involves ambulances, riot police and a marauding pack of savages tyrannising the city centre. Aggressive thugs will viciously chase one another across the street, stuff chips down their throats and whenever you approach their chicks, they will swoop and try to kill you…and that’s just the gulls. Drink up or face the consequences.

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Aye Right

03/02/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As part of this year’s census people in Scotland will be asked if they understand, speak, read or write in Scots. The census counts everyone in Scotland once every ten years and I was initially surprised that the Aye Can website referred to ‘Scots’ as a language. Gaelic in my opinion is Scotland’s only independent tongue whereas Scots is a broad term for a loose confederation of dialects. Scots is a Germanic language and has evolved from Old English and Norse to be spoken throughout the land although not exclusively. For speaking in a Scottish accent is not the same as speaking in Scots.

Having spent the majority of my life in the North East of Scotland, I am already familiar with one of the richest Scottish dialects in Doric. The 18th century poet Allan Ramsey (1686-1758) was the first to apply the name Doric as an alternative name for Scots. In the 18th century, Scots was compared with the rustic peasant tongue of Ancient Greece, spoken in Doria, while English, the official language of the new British state of 1707, became associated with Attic, the standard language of the city states.

In post-industrial Scotland, the Doric label crept northwards and is now commonly associated with the Grampian region. Despite living in rural Aberdeenshire for over twenty years, I can’t speak in Doric or even read it properly as this wonderfully impenetrable article by Robbie Shepherd will duly illustrate. With my Anglo-Irish parents holding sway, I grew up from my Mother’s knee speaking English and often felt estranged from my peers and elders who did spik in the mither tongue.

As a product of North Sea oil, I found myself being brought up as a British migrant child in the part of Scotland no one really cares about. Geographically isolated and deeply unfashionable, I remember going to primary school and watching oil rigs pump billions into the nation’s economy from my class window. With oil barely receiving a mention in Thatcher’s memoirs, I can recall studying History at two of the country’s oldest universities, one of them being Aberdeen, and hoping to learn about how my region shaped our nation’s fortunes.

But Aberdeen rarely ever featured in my lectures and text books. All the great battles, figures and political incidents took place in the social and economic heartbeat of Scotland’s Central Belt. While the misty romances of Gaeldom provided the poets and tourists with a chocolate box vision of the Highlands. Even when the North East should have become more relevant in the latter end of the 20th century, it appears going offshore every two weeks in Thatcher’s Britain is nowhere near as romantic as ‘goin down pit’.

On being asked whether I speak or read in Scots, I can recollect the social differences in dialect from my childhood years in a commuter village south of Aberdeen. Even my Scottish peers spoke in a far softer tone than the raw Aberdeen dialect we regularly encountered at football matches and school activity weeks. Children from my school would dismiss kids fae Aberdeen as ‘toonsers’ and their accents were frequently mocked for being uncouth and poorly spoken.

Obviously I was too young to understand the social class dimension behind these childish views.  The oil boom of the late 1970s had transformed a previously isolated region, and resulted in a steady influx of non-Scots speakers into the area. Although miles away from the coastal strip of oil rich villages, the Doric tongue continues to baffle outsiders in the traditional braes and communities of the North East. As a student I remember labouring in the summer around the time of last census in the market town of Stonehaven. While obviously out of place, I struggled to keep up with the broad dialect of the labourers in the yard. The old men manning the vans would comically refer to me as a lanky ‘guffy’, and curiously enough this is a derogatory term for an Englishman.

Despite being born and raised in Aberdeenshire, I persistently felt like an outsider during my three month stint in the yard. And while any attempt to speak in Doric would have made me an imposter, I am relieved globalisation has not completely extinguished the ancient tongue of the North East. For while I cannot speak in Scots, I long for it continue regardless of whether it is a language or not.

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Leaving the 20th Century

09/07/2010 By in Musings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

When I first heard the Manics were releasing a new single called ‘(It’s Not War) Just The End Of Love’, I felt a minor sense of exhilaration but this was quickly followed by embarrasment. The Manics always make me cringe. They have done so from the age of 23. The band’s latest single while gloriously melodic is lyrically stodgy and indulges in meaningless platitudes. It is a thoroughly decent pop song nevertheless but it will pass through most people’s daily lives unnoticed. Anna Friel looks absolutely gorgeous as a sexually frustrated librarian and how they managed to get the brilliant Michael Sheen to take part I’ll never know. Although him getting the opportunity to lust over Anna Friel on a chess table probably had something to do with it.

The Manics and teenage hyperbole will never be separated. In many ways they were the closest I ever came to joining a cult. As a shy Scottish teenager I can vividly remember reading their biographies, listening to CDs and reading selective works of George Orwell, Jack Kerouac, Slyvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. On becoming an obsessive fan in the late nineties, I fully immersed myself in the DIY fan culture and began collecting all of their albums, books and videos at record fairs in Aberdeen.

Not having any money I could rarely afford to buy their handmade early singles but every month I would go just to look at the Situationist artwork or bootleg videos. During the granite wintry months, I would stumble wearing an Aberdeen football scarf and make friends with Clash fans in vintage punk jackets covered in snotty white tipp-ex. Despite knowing I didn’t have any money to feed my habit, I would go back return every month because obsession compelled me every time. What I ask myself is would this happen now? Sure you have vinyl obsessives and niche dance guys looking for old records to pillage, sample and plunder. Otherwise all you have to do is type in a few words into Google and every interview, demo tape and muffled remark is available free online.

The last time I saw them play live was at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange in April 2005 and I vowed at the time that I would never see them again.

The Manics reached their saturation point years ago though and it felt strange seeing them live again. There was something serene and ghostly calm about them, previous landmark singles that were once powerful statements had now become cabaret and were played with a jukebox familiarity. The Holy Bible songs were absolutely amazing, especially Of Walking Abortion and If White America, which were like vicious snarling scabs and for blurring white seconds I felt like I was obsessed and eighteen all over again. They ended their set with a crashing version of Motown Junk, which started off with Paradise City by Guns and Roses and it was coolest send off ever! The thudding drums whipped the crowd to a chaotic frenzy and it was the perfect ending to a heavenly evening. It was the goodbye moment I had always wanted.

By keeping to my word I’ve managed to keep my memories intact. In a way I actually admire their resilence and how they’ve managed to maintain keep their profile up after 20 years on the road. It is quite remarkable really because it is not like they were ever musical pioneers. Although I’ve now come to realise that indie music is for kids really and this can lead to a lot of heartache when you get older.

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