Cringeworthy

I remember watching an episode of QI in which the host, "national treasure" Stephen Fry, seemed to delight in discomfiting Scottish panellist Fred MacAulay with a list of thing commonly associated with Scotland for which alternative origins could be cited. The intention was clearly not to inform but to make Fred feel uncomfortable. It did rather confirm for me my suspicion that Fry is just another self-satisfied Oxbridge tosser, along with the likes of David Mitchell and so on.

But this sort of stuff is lapped up by those Scots burdened with that anti-syzygistic self-loathing "cringe" that comes from having ceded authority over your own narrative about your identity to someone else with a different agenda. The Scottish Cringe is due, at least in part, to this process: a certain class has legitimised its wealth, privilege and authority on the basis of a foreign (in this instance Anglo-British) narrative and has come to despise their native one as a consequence.

The process becomes automatic, until a transition is made from learning nothing about your own narrative to thinking there is nothing to learn. Eventually you are able to discuss your Scottishness only in terms that would not be incongruent at a Home Counties garden party, utterly alienated from yourself, unable to imagine yourself as anything other than something exotic, foreign, fleetingly peripheral, at one moment an entertaining distraction to the other guests, at the next a nuisance beneath contempt, your bank notes hilarious and quaint right up to the moment you try to pay your way with them, as you suppress your accent to make yourself understood.

These are the sort of people who write articles such as this one in the Scotsman today, following the pattern of which Stephen Fry provided another example I mentioned above, in which Scotland and Scottishness is deemed invalid or illegitimate simply because it does not exhibit some impossible degree of autochthony that is not required of any other nation or community.

Consider how ridiculous it would be to say the following:

• Cricket isn't English, it is derived from games already played in France that were possibly imported to England by the Plantagenets. Edward II and Edward I, French-speaking Plantagenet kings of England, are known to have played a game of "creag" at Newenden, Kent in 1301. In Old French, the word criquet meant a kind of club or stick. The earliest written evidence of the game of cricket dates back to France, in a letter written to King Louis XI in 1478, by a man named Estiavannet. This suggests that it shares its origins with croquet, which also involves "wickets" with the innovation in cricket being the striking of a ball raised off the ground. The word "wicket" is from the Old French "wiket" meaning a small door or grille.
• Roast beef isn't English. Meat from cattle has been cooked using fire probably as far back as the advent of Homo Erectus 1.5M years ago. 
• The Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo, wasn't English. In fact he was from Ireland. Arthur Wellesley was born in Dublin and was made the 1st Duke of Wellington after distinguishing himself in military command with an exemplary battle record in India, Iberia and ultimately at Waterloo. 
• The queen isn't English. There is no such thing as the "Queen of England". The queen is styled as monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and her other realms. It makes as much sense to call her "Queen of England" as it does "Queen of Surbiton". And of course the individual who currently occupies the throne is a member of the German family of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (they changed their name to Windsor during the First World War to differentiate themselves from our enemy at the time, their cousin, the Kaiser).  
• England isn't English. In fact, it is named after a district of Denmark call Angeln from which a people known as the Angles originated. The term "anglo-saxon" is a modern scholarly invention that combines a name for people from Angeln in Denmark with another name for hired thugs that was current in the Low Countries at the time, saxons, or men who had a saex (a type of sword). A more accurate designation for England might be Greater Wessex or Ny Angeln ("New Angeln" in Danish). 

How utterly ridiculous! Of course cricket, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and the name "England", are all quintessentially English. Everything I have just said is just a series of tedious, tendentious, vexatious, utterly pointless quibbles. If I was at all serious I could justifiably be accused of trolling, of casually demeaning the English.

So why does the Scotsman feel the need to quibble about whether golf, whisky, tartan, and so on are "really" Scottish? It tells us more about what Scotland means to the writer than the Scottishness of what he writes about.

Too often these days journalists in the mainstream media in Scotland are nothing more than trolls on a payroll.