It'll see me oot...

By popular request - this is not what I would have chosen to blip today but so many people demanded/asked nicely for a blip of the new floor covering that I thought I had better. Here it is then, for better or worse. At least the stuff that makes your eyes sore is decently hidden again!

There's a cultural wiring in lowland Scots which is what I am. I saw it in the good folk around me as I grew up. If they get something new they will say - "It'll see me oot". If someone's not sounding too well they will say - "A clean shirt will do him".

And dear fellow blippers - I have not the slightest idea why laying a bit of vinyl makes me think of that. When I went back to Galloway a few weeks ago for a funeral I felt maybe that a little of that country fatalistic acceptance is not being found in the younger generation. Why would it? "Sophistication" is breaking in. But I'm happy - when in the mood - to stick with my beloved Samuel Rutherford Crockett who described the little church and churchyard of Balmaghie like this:-

But when the years are over, many or few, and our Galloway requiem, "Sae he's won awa'," is said of me - that is the bell I should like rung. And there, in the high corner, I should like to lie, if so the fates allot it, among the dear and simple folk I knew and loved in youth. Let them lay me not far from the martyrs, where one can hear the birds crying in the minister's lilac-bushes, and Dee kissing the river grasses, as he lingers a little wistfully about the bonny green kirk-knowe of Balmaghie.