{"id":1889,"date":"2007-02-04T18:35:51","date_gmt":"2007-02-04T18:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1889"},"modified":"2007-02-04T23:50:48","modified_gmt":"2007-02-04T23:50:48","slug":"a-short-lesson-in-scottish-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1889","title":{"rendered":"A short lesson in Scottish culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been in Perth for the weekend for a wedding (not, as you might have guessed the Australian one), so have been enjoying a short course in traditional Scottish culture. Among the notable elements was the handfasting element<\/a> in the ceremony – the physical binding of the couple’s hands together – the bride being piped in and out, and the full-on ceilidh (pronounced “kay-lee” I’m assured) afterwards. <\/p>\n

The lesson I learnt from that one: next time wear flat shoes – traditional Scottish dancing and heels don’t go well together – although my ankles will recover eventually, however, I’m sure. But it did make the men in their kilts – by no means all Scots but a brave collection crossing from Canada to Latvia – look very good. And it made me think of those days a few centuries ago when fashion meant the men would have been the peacocks of any party.<\/p>\n

Perth itself struck me as a city of boom and bust. There’s very little medieval surviving here, someone I was chatting to said that was the religious wars that did for that, and then along came Cromwell<\/a> to do some further damage (a note on the high street explains he destroyed the ancient mercat (market) square). And then there were the Jacobite rebellions. <\/p>\n

But there was obviously a huge building boom after that, with a great many surviving Georgian buildings in the town, followed by a Victorian boom in civic buildings and a 1960s boom in both flats and (some) public buildings. Well the Georgian ones, such as the James VI Hospital, are nice to look at…<\/p>\n

The feel now is of a city with some people doing very nicely indeed – are were boutiques and restaurants with almost London prices, but Poundstretcher is also doing a roaring trade, and there are a surprising number of rough sleepers for a city of this size, plus some of the most aggressive beggars I have encountered anywhere in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been in Perth for the weekend for a wedding (not, as you might have guessed the Australian one), so have been enjoying a short course in traditional Scottish culture. Among the notable elements was the handfasting element in the ceremony – the physical binding of the couple’s hands together – the bride being piped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}