Re "anti-Campbell prejudice"   -- The whole point of my story was separation of historical memory from ordinary human relations. In other words, "you spit when you say the name Campbell" DIDN'T mean that the spitting Scot had anything against this particular Campbell or indeed any living Campbell. It didn't mean that he was prejudiced "against Campbells" in the way that "myself" takes it--only, at least as I heard the story (a made up one, I suspect) that he remembered a historic betrayal of hospitality that has indeed clung to the name.

An impossible distinction? How would I like to have MY name reviled?

As a matter of fact, I vividly remember a singaround in a Highland pub where we started singing "The Rape of Glencoe" and a Campbell jumped up and loudly objected. Nobody was going to sing that scurrilous song in his presence. He was quite forceful about it too, rising to victimhood with boisterous theatricality.

Somehow, it was hard to see him as any more oppressed than the people of Banff, who 300 years ago "pit the clock an hour afore and hanged him [MacPherson] tae a tree." THAT's still remembered in scurrilous folksong too, still "held against" the town....