Really, I should be pretty good at being Scottish. After all my mother was Scotswoman of the Year 1978 and you’d think the competition for top Scotswoman would be pretty fierce in Scotland. But my mother never taught me the basics of Scottish dancing, how to rustle up a succulent haggis or a nice creamy […]
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My Declaration of Arbroath
Here is my translation of Scotland’s most important document, said to be the basis for the US Declaration of Independence. I paraphrased a bit. Jesus didn’t say “awesome” all that often. To read my fascinating pre-translation ramble on the topic of Tartan Day, click here. Dear Pope, We are a posse of Scottish blokes. The Scots […]
Tartan Day!
I’m sure everyone else is just as excited about it being Tartan Day as I am. Tartan Day, yeah! That’s right, the day when people round the world carouse and consume tartan-coloured pints and everyone wears tartan… Um… Yeah, I know, most people have never heard of Tartan Day. Like the Patrick’s Day parades, Tartan Day was […]
The clever one
This morning I got an email from my sister, and was once again reminded that we are very, very different. She spent her morning, voluntarily, at a museum coin club. I spent it suffering the aftereffects of enthusiastic wine consumption at a party last night in Toronto. My sister and I are a year and […]
A convoke of pies
No idea why, but some weird spambot blog has used a post of mine but fed it through some sort of olde worlde Babelfish translator thingy. This is now my favourite edit of this chapter so far. I would never have thought of describing my discomfort as “fugacious.” Here are a few of my favourite […]
Learning to be Scottish in American-English
The last couple of days, I’ve been working on pesky wee details about the book. Like whether it’s in British-English or American-English. At the moment it’s mid-Atlantic. Half and half. I live considerably to the left of the Atlantic and write for a slew of US outlets, so writing in US English makes sense. But […]
Going the distance
At one stage, early on in “The Scottish Ambassador” process, I thought writing this book would be a fairly straightforward task. After all, this is not my first book. I wrote my first one when I was six. How hard could another one be? My writing career has shown some consistencies over the decades. My […]
Resolve.
Last week AOL asked me to write a piece on travel resolutions for their readers. While those five are definitely contenders for my own personal list of resolutions (with the possible exception of drinking plastic bags of tea—I prefer it by the bucket), my version features a few alternative aspirations for 2011. 1 Wreak revenge […]
