Bonnie Scotland

O, ye'll take the high road, and I'll take the low road. And I'll be in Scotland afore ye.

I want to go to Scotland.

I want to arrive at Prestwick Airport and hear the voices. If one, lone Scottish accent can command attention in a crowded place on this side of the pond, what will it sound like when the buzz is nothing but Scottish burr?

I want to see the highlands and climb to where the ocean meets the sky, and down a wee dram or two of scotch while I’m there. Maybe I’ll even learn to like the stuff.

I want to hear the mournful skirls of the pipes in the place where they belong.  I want to see Edinburgh and explore castles and medieval architecture.

I want to see an Old Firm game between Rangers and Celtic, get drunk, and live to tell the tale the next day.  Maybe by the time I can afford to do this, Rangers will have returned from financial purgatory and this match can actually happen.

Most of all, I want to see Aberdeenshire, the ‘shoulder’ of Scotland, thrusting out mightily into the North Sea. That’s where I’ll find Fraserburgh, the town where my father grew up. That’s where I’ll find Pennan, the spectacular little seaside village where my grandmother – my nana – spent her childhood.

That’s where I’ll find a piece of my heart: from a place I’ve never been.

Pennan, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Bonnie Scotland has always sparked something deep inside me, despite the fact that I am just half Scottish and truthfully, was not raised in a Scottish household. The kitchen was always my mother’s domain and my Sunday dinner plate would be far more likely be piled high with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding (yumm!) than it would ever see haggis or finnan haddie.

The only contribution Dad would make to my mother’s English dinner table would be the grace he would always say (and still does), straight from the pages of Robert Burns himself:

“Some hae meat and canna eat, and some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat, and say the Lord be thankit.”

Bless my English family, which is now down to my mom and three cousins, but there’s no pre-dinner speech like that in merry old England. Humble, confusing – who has meat and can’t eat it? – and best of all, short.

So no haggis, no trips to the homeland and no accent, either. My father has none to speak of and never had one in my lifetime – I would have to visit my cousins or my Nana to hear those familiar rolling rrrrrs – because he’s from The Broch and they don’t exactly speak English in those parts.

They spik Doric up Fraserburgh way, a dialect of the Scots language that is rich in strange phrases such as fit like? (how are you?); gie’s a bosie! (give us a hug!) and dinna be coorse or a’ll skelp yer dowp (don’t be naughty or I’ll smack your bottom). Soccer? Aye, it’s fitbaa, laddie.

The BBC shoots documentaries on life in the north-east of Scotland from time to time, and when they do they use sub-titles. Not just for the English, but also for the viewers in the rest of Scotland.

So when my Dad, fresh-faced and all of 18 or so, came to Toronto to make his mark in the world, he had to tone down the burr if he wanted to be understood. Before I came along, he was completely burr-less.

If I wanted to immerse myself in Scottish ways, I only had to visit the Martins and the Strachans, the families of my Dad’s two sisters, Norma and Jan. My Uncle Jimmy (who hailed from nearby Peterhead) and my Uncle George (Glasgow area) are gone now, as is my Nana. I miss them.

I still have my aunts, my cousins (Steve and Neil; Janice and Jill) and their children to help keep me close to my roots, but I want to go to Scotland very badly. I even made a rash promise to Jake that we would visit in 2014.

But dinna fash yersel on my behalf; there’s no need for me to get doon aboot the mou. I can make this happen. If I don’t I fear I’ll be like the soldier, sensing his own mortality after a crushing defeat at the hands of the English, penning the chorus’ last lines from the famous Scottish song:

For me and me true love will ne'er meet agin’; On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.

Aye.