Category Archives: Nostalgia

Scottish Hallowe’en

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In recent years Halloween has become very popular in parts of Britain where it had been completely unknown before, and by that I mean England. Unfortunately it is the American version of it featuring pumpkins, which are completely alien growths in Britain. Sadly, because there are now no Scottish owned supermarkets we aren’t even able to buy the big turnips which are a necessity for making the carved turnip lanterns which ward off evil spirits.

And here it is lit.

I had to make do with this small turnip and yes, I do know that in England this is what is called a swede, but as far as we are concerned there is nothing Scandinavian about it at all! Say no to pumpkins, unless you happen to be American. Seriously, I once carved a pumpkin and I couldn’t believe how horrible it smelled, just like sick. How could anyone possibly eat them, maybe that one was over-ripe. Are they supposed to smell of sick.

When I was a wee girl Hallowe’en was a really big thing and there were always school/Brownies/Scout parties where we dooked for apples and ate huge pancakes which had been spread with black treacle and strung up across the room. With hands behind your back and up on tiptoe to reach the pancakes, there was just no way you could eat them without getting your hair and face covered with treacle. We were all dressed up as witches, warlocks, ghosts or pirates too. Such fun!!

When we went out dressed like that it was called ‘guising’, obviously because you were in disguise. We were only allowed to visit the houses of friends or relatives and we had to sing a song or tell jokes, something to entertain the householders anyway. In return we would be given some fruit, nuts or sweets and sometimes a small amount of money.

There was none of this terrible chaos that seems to go on nowadays, especially in England, where they seem to have got the wrong end of the stick altogether.

Hallowe’en is the old pagan festival signifying the end of summertime, which it is literally as we’ve just moved the clocks back an hour and we’re now on Greenwich Mean Time.

Tidying Up

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The school holidays have gone in a flash as usual and I can really hardly believe that this is the last week of them. This is the week when we always realise that we haven’t got around to doing half of the things that we had planned to do. We still have lots of house maintenance things to do but of course the bad weather has held us back again.

Yesterday we tackled one of the attics. The worst thing about having plenty of storage space in a house is that you tend just to hoard things. The more space you have the more rubbish you accumulate, I find.

But we got right down to the end of the attic and came up with bags of baby clothes and all sorts of stuff that we couldn’t think why we wanted to hold on to. The baby clothes were stored away just in case we decided to have a third child. In the end we decided that we couldn’t face all the sleepless nights and nappy washing again. Yes, I was the last person in the western world still to use terry towelling nappies/diapers, but I hear that they are beginning to be used again.
The old nappies were sent off to Rumania years ago.

So we’ve been busy being astonished by how tiny the clothes are and sorting stuff out for recycling and taking to charity shops. There are still some books which I was sure were in there but they haven’t surfaced, which is annoying.

The other attic has a cot, pram and high chair in it. Time has gone so quickly that I’m tempted to hold on to them just in case we ever do have grandchildren at some point in the future.

So one attic is almost empty now, it only has an ancient BBC computer in it, and that is the way that it is going to stay. Don’t ask me why they want to hold on to the computer. I would chuck it out but all the blokes in my family said NO!

Scottish words: skellum, ken speckle

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I noticed whilst I was reading Greenmantle that John Buchan was ‘doing his bit’ in keeping Scottish words going as far back as 1915 when he wrote the book.

skellum

He has his character Sandy using the word – skellum – which means a rascal, rogue, a ne’er do weel (never do well).

ken speckle

Ken speckle means that someone is well recognised, well known.

Whilst I’ve seen this phrase written down plenty of times, I’ve only ever heard it used in speech once. It was by a very old man in Kinross high street and it was the first time I had come across the word but I think it is an easy one to guess the meaning of. So, despite John Buchan, it isn’t doing too well and I’m going to use it whenever I can. Of course it can be written as all one word.

Apparently kenspeckle is originally from Ole Norse and I’m pretty sure that skellum is too given the fact that it starts with sk.

Scottish words: Going for my messages

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Obviously this one is more of a Scottish phrase although I didn’t even realise that it was Scottish until I moved to the south of England for a few years in the late 70s.

I was met with puzzled faces when I said to people ‘I’m going for my messages’. They just couldn’t think what I meant by it and I thought that everybody used the word messages to mean food shopping, so I was really surprised when I had to explain it to them.

It is probably more common to hear people saying ‘I’m away for my messages’ – and they just mean that they are going to the supermarket.

In the days of my childhood when children were allowed to roam the streets on their own at a young age it was common to see them being sent for a message and that could mean something like picking up the dry cleaning or paying a bill for their mother. We were given quite a lot of responsibility in those days as youngster.

When you think about it, it sounds a strange thing to say. So I can see why Sassenachs were completely in the dark as to what I was talking about. Poor sowls.

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

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Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
by J.M. Barrie.

I’m lucky enough to have my mother’s 1925 copy of this book, which has the lovely Arthur Rackham illustrations. Obviously this book comes under the category of a book from childhood but I’ve read it a few times since then and I always enjoy it. It is the very beginning of the Peter Pan story and is actually the middle section of The Little White Bird which was published before Peter Pan and Wendy.

The book starts with The Grand Tour of the Gardens, in which the gardens and some of the characters to be found there are described. Sexism is rife as you would expect from something written so long ago and by a Scottish man, but it is all quite tongue in cheek.

J.M. Barrie had a wonderful, fantastical imagination and a beautiful way with words.

Babies were birds before they were human and have to think hard to remember the time when they could fly.

Peter Pan escapes from being human by flying from the nursery window ledge when he is only 7 days old and flies to Kensington Gardens.

He knows that it must be past lock-out time as the place is full of fairies who are too busy to notice him. When he meets with Solomon Caw after flying to the island in the middle of The Serpentine he realises that he has lost faith in his ability to fly and so is stuck on the island. Solomon declares him to be a Betwixt-and-Between.

Although he is happy on the island for a while, he misses being able to play the way children do and begins to plan how he can escape from the island. Eventually he pays the thrushes to build him a nest big enough for him to fit into and he sails over to the gardens again, but he can only leave the island at night after the park is closed.

The girl in this book is called Maimie and when she is locked in the gardens overnight, the fairies build a little house around her so that she doesn’t die of the cold.

If you have read Peter Pan you might find it interesting to read the book which it developed from.

When Barrie was just 7 years old his 14 year old brother died in an ice skating accident and it is thought that this tragedy was what prompted Barrie to write about a boy who didn’t grow up.

J.M. Barrie is one of the few authors who made up a name for a character which became popular with parents. He came up with it because a wee girl of his acquaintance who couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘r’, described herself as his little ‘fwendy’.

You can visit the Barrie family home in Kirriemuir and the original Wendy house, which is the old wash house in the back garden. Kirriemuir is about 40 miles from where I live. It is quite a pretty small town which differs from most Scottish towns in that it was built from red sandstone instead of the usual grey.

When J.M. Barrie died in 1937, he chose to be buried in Kirriemuir with his family instead of in Poets Corner in London.

I reviewed this book as part of the Flashback Challenge.

Here is a video from 1937 showing some places of interest around Kirriemuir.

Scottish words: fantoosh

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You don’t hear the word fantoosh all that often nowadays but I think it is a great word and I use it whenever I can.

If something or someone is being described as being fantoosh it means that they, or it, is overdressed, ultra fashionable, over-ornamented, too fancy. Just downright over the top.

I always think that this word should be of French derivation as quite a lot of Scottish words are, due to the influence of the French people who came to Edinburgh when Mary, Queen of Scots came back from France as a young widow. There is a part of Edinburgh which is still called Little France, however I can’t find any evidence that it derives from French.

I do think that fantoosh is quite presbyterian though as I’ve always heard it used in a slightly disapproving way. It’s the feeling that anything too fancy must be sinful. It’s the influence of Calvinism I suppose.

Anyway, I really like fantoosh and I’d hate it to die out, although I suppose if you were in America it might sound a bit rude to some people as it’s almost like two words for bum (butt) spliced together.

That might make it all the more desirable to use though, just for a laugh.

Scottish words: Chittering/Chittery-bite.

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Frozen fountain in Beveridge Park

As you can see from this photograph it has been so cold here that everything has frozen up. It has been colder than Norway, Finland and the South Pole.

So we have all been chittering, which is the Scottish word for shivering. You might think it strange when I say that my worst attacks of chittering have always been in the summertime. The reason for this is that when you are wee, you seem to have a thing for paddling in water, and before you know it, you’re up to your neck in it. I’ve noticed that this happens to dogs too.

There’s no sense to it whatsoever because you know that you are either in the North Sea or a loch full of snow melt from the mountains. So it can’t be anything other than freezing and you’re going to end up chittering within about 10 seconds of hitting the water.

Luckily your mum will have come prepared with a chittery-bite. This is something nice for you to eat – a sandwich or a cake or maybe chocolate. Anything for you to get your teeth wrapped around and before long, you will have stopped chittering and your mum has saved you from hypothermia – again.

New Year 2010

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Well it turned out to be just about the quietest Hogmanay that we have ever had. For the first time since we had kids we ended up spending it on our own. Usually our house is full of young people as our boys have always had their friends spending the time here and we come down to a lot of half dead bodies in the morning, which has a charm all of its own.

This year however, as they have both finished university and found good jobs, one has his own place with his girlfriend and the other is planning to move out very soon, they were both doing their own things, very strange.

We had a bit of a drink together and after a short time decided just to go to bed as the pavements are still too dangerous for gallivanting about on even in the daylight, very icy.

We were all strung out along the east coast of Scotland from Dundee to Burntisland. From Burntisland beach you can see the firework display which they have on Edinburgh Castle battlements. At midnight all the ships in the Firth of Forth hooted their horns. Everyone ended up back at home base in Kirkcaldy for the New Year meal. I know that as the cook I shouldn’t boast but I must admit that it was a great leg of lamb.

The cooking reminded me that in my family home it was the tradition to have a huge meal on Hogmanay. Whilst I was doing all the house cleaning, my mum was busy cooking an enormous steak pie with all the trimmings which was ready to be served around about 10.30/11.00 at night on Hogmanay. The idea was that if the men got a big stodgy meal inside them, then they wouldn’t get so drunk after midnight – they needed something to line their stomachs.

Notice that I said ‘the men’, because when I was a youngster very few women drank alcohol. A very small sherry would be the most that any of them would have. I can’t help thinking that things would be much better if we went back to that way of behaving. I’ve seen some terrible mother role models for young girls recently. Why would any woman want their children to see them paralytically sozzled? Mind you, it isn’t any better if fathers end up like that too.

Well that’s me got my first blog moan of the year over with and my last post about this new year.

Hogmanays of the Past

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When I think of the Hogmanays of my childhood I always seem to be up to my elbows in cleaning stuff. My mum insisted that the whole house had to be turned upside-down and scoured from top to bottom in the traditional Scottish way. As I am the youngest by far, it fell to me to do it all.

This is one tradition which I never had any intention of keeping going and if there is some dust from 2009 still in the house, who cares, not me anyway.

I think it will be a quiet Hogmanay for us this year, although you never can tell until we get there.

As promised in an earlier post, I’m going to be rejigging my blog for the new year. At the moment, it’s very basic as I wasn’t sure if I would carry on with it, but as I’ve had lots more visitors than I had anticipated having, I’ve really been encouraged to continue. It doesn’t seem to matter that I don’t have a post every day, I’ve always prefered quality over quantity in anything.

Look out for a Scottish cliche at ‘The Bells’.