Wings Over Scotland | The Lady

I usually don’t bite, but John Main and Joe…

Your efforts to gloss over the experience of people you’ve never met and know nothing about as experiencing “banter” or “complete BS” is symptomatic of the reality of a situation you’d have us all believe doesn’t exist.

The only Scots which “made it” in any field in England, in my experience, are those who put their Britishness before their Scottishness, and who in order to ‘get on’ were happy to play the house-Jock and tolerated the “banter”… the “sweaty sock” in place of their given name, the “white wog” comments, the being asked to repeat yourself because nobody in the room speaks “jockanese”, who smiled when the chorus of “I’d rather be a paki than a jock” was struck up in the pub, as opposed to simply walking out, packing up and going home.

After 7 years in England I transferred home, with the same company I should add. But I’d also spent a year working in Canada. Did I experience anything remotely like I had in England? Absolutely not. The worst I’d ever had was being referred to as “Scotty”. That was it! How utterly f***ing refreshing that was, to live and work with people who didn’t give an actual shit about where you were from, other than to ask what it was like to live there.

Incidentally, when I relocated home, my English wife came with me. Has she experienced the equivalent to what I did in England? Abso-fucking-lutely! The Scots aren’t saints – not by any stretch, and despite having now spent more of her 50+ years in Scotland than in England, she still gets shit from the Scottish variety of mouth breather that I encountered with depressing regularity in England.

So, John and Jo, unless you’ve experienced it at first hand, please feel free to go to the fridge and get yourself a big, family sized helping of STFU.