PORRIDGE

Why is there no monument
To Porridge in our land?
It's good enough to eat,
It's good enough to stand!

On a plinth in London
A statue we should see
Of Porridge made in Scotland
Signed, "Oatmeal, O.B.E."
(By a young dog of three)

Spike Milligan

The image is from the BBC Production of Sunset Song - a 1932 novel by the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon. It is widely regarded as one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20th century. The central character is a young woman, Chris Guthrie, growing up in a farming family in The Mearns in the north east of Scotland at the start of the 20th century. Life is hard. It is a seminal and moving work.

My former local paper - The Paisley Daily Express - famously got it wrong when the 1932 reviewer claimed that the whole thing "wearied" him!