Today is St. Andrew’s Day, Scotland’s national day.
A time for Scottish people to reflect on something or perhaps anything but particularly about being Scottish.
A time for a Scotsman living in England to reflect on why they live in England and why they came to England and why they stay in England.
This weekend, by accident I remembered the little scrap book that I have of my ‘basketball days’ from 35 years ago.
I pulled it out of the cupboard and was showing it to the kids but in amongst that is a photograph from 1990 of me with two of my then best friends in Mallorca on the balcony of our apartment before we went out for the night.
We’re crouched down and I’m in the middle of the group and the two on each end have a beer in their outside hands and they are both wearing Celtic strips but I’m wearing a Scotland strip.
At first look the picture broke my heart for a youth that I have lost and for the waste of the possibility that lay before me.
I was at the end of first year university and I was still fit and skinny and hadn’t quite ‘let myself go’ in the crazy and ridiculous way I did.
The telling thing about the photograph is though that I’m wearing a Scotland strip and not a Celtic strip because I’m Scottish before I’m Celtic.
Less than 3 ½ years before that photograph was taken, I was listening to a team talk in a dressing room in a sports centre in Dundee from a man called Stuart Taylor.
We were about to play our first ever international at the start of January 1987 and he was explaining the principle of ‘represent’.
In that short speech he explained to us that the team we were about to face had probably never been to Scotland or never met a Scotsman or anything to do with Scotland and as far as they were concerned we were Scotland.
We represented everything about Scotland to the people that were in front of us.
Clearly, I’ve never forgotten that but I remember it time and time again and wonder if my job in England isn’t to be a Dentist but to be a Scotsman.
To be a Scotsman is different from almost anybody else, it is to have a chip on your shoulder, it’s also to have a mischievous side, it’s certainly to have humour and it’s also to have extraordinary generosity.
The myth about Scottish people being tight is just that. I have never met people to be more generous than Scottish people are generous.
This fact alone has been demonstrated to my wife (English) time and time and time again but not least when she used to take my kids back to my mum and dads on the plane on her own and noticed (of her own accord) that she was always helped off the plane in Glasgow by Scottish people but never helped off the plane in Nottingham.
I don’t celebrate St. Andrew’s Day but it usually reminds me to continue to represent.
It’s important for all of us to have a cause (at least one) because as the guys in Public Enemy suggested in 2013 in the song that matches the title of this blog.
“If you don’t stand for something, you fall for anything”.
Blog Post Number - 2569