Well, as the thread title says, " Gaelic Scotland, As others see us!" The perception by others of the scot and his culture is the heart of the matter.

Say "Irish" and the popular image a few years ago would be the drunken unwashed illiterate labourer, singing Danny Boy, and ready to punch out anybody who seemed to insult Guinness, Ould Ireland, the Pope, or the IRA. Thankfully that image has changed, due in no small part to the popularisation of irish music and pseudo-irish culture. This has also brought about some awareness of celt-icity, and all that entails, with mystic faerie and arthurian legend mixed up in the brew. However, there has been a revival of interest in "real" folk music and song as heard and sung by some geniuses and a lot of ordinary people in ordinary life, and about some extra-ordinary situations in the history of Ireland.

Now, a few years ago, if somebody said "scot" the popular image abroad would have been the dour hypocritic wowser, clad in a tweed jacket and kilt of dubious authenticity, playing the pipes while bemoaning the loss of a baw-bee, hunting a haggis, and getting maudlin-drunk on whisky on a Saturday night. This image is just as false as was that of the irishman, but in many cases it is still firmly held. I feel that in many cases we have actively encouraged it, partly because we ourselves can find it amusing, but also as a kind of defence derived from a sense of inferiority instilled into us... my, but we're a fine bundle of neurotic paranoia when we're abroad. My point about the scene here in Oz twenty-odd years ago was that ordinary scots in Scotland didn't have the same pressure to "tartanise" as they did overseas. Out here they did, and still do. The gaelic language is just one aspect of the whole thing. Because it was not being spoken much in Scotland for various reasons, scots abroad tended to lose it completely. For many years it was seen as an inferior language. You'd go a long way here to find many who speak gaelic, except for a very few. It is the other scots tongues that are heard, and instantly recogniseable - if not always comprehensible. The ordinary scot abroad is always immediately identified. Very few people mistake us for irish, and are usually gently corrected...... But the use of any distinctive language, and especially with the poetic potential of the scots dialects, is to be encouraged.

Teribus made the point that in his days in Scotland, entertainment was what the ordinary people made for themselves, and that today, this has largely disappeared. I agree completely. That was what gave us our "real" folk music over the centuries. The tendency to give that up in exchange for ready-made popular insta-stuff is lamentable, but surely our task is to try to put "good" "real" "folk" music before the public so that they get to see what it's like, and hopefully enjoy it. Educate the audiences, as many of the best names in folk music have always done. There was a lot of good stuff among the pseudo-irish material, and it made people aware. That's really what we need for scots material, but it isn't going to work if the majority still believe in the image of the laird in his argyle jacket, hairy sporran and kilt, jumping up and down on somebody's sword half way up a heather-clad hillside as depicted from the time of Victoria.

We have had a long and chequered history and there are any number of excellent writers of it, as well as brilliant musicians and singers who can provide the real stories from it. Let's emphasise that aspect and the dross will be sifted from the whole body of material which the music and tourism industries produces in their drive to make money.

I've just read what I've written.... Damn, but it sounds pompous. Doon aff ra box again........