Rigsy got me thinking about lament, as she's off being Flora MacDonald, at least in shorthand. We regularly lament better times and the dead. The Scots lament the Battle of Culloden. We all might, as this unleashed the British rather than English on the world. It was an odd battle, between armies of seven and eight thousand, mostly Scots, and over in an hour. There were English there, some like the Manchester Regiment, fighting for the 'Scots' and there were Irish and Scots loaned by the French to the 'Scots'. And Germans and Austrians. Only one in five Scots' had swords and anyway, the hour was won by massed musket fire. It was then end of the Jacobite threat to the English throne, by then German. Things might have been different if a French fleet hadn't turned left too soon and landed in Ireland a couple of years before.
Culloden is a miserable place neat Inverness. One soon laments being there and it is unlikely not to be cold and raining. Only simpletons would think this a battle between England and Scotland. It was about land and making more economic use of it, often by replacing people with sheep - hence, perhaps, today's term 'the sheeple'. This had been going on years all over Britain. My own clan, the MacArthurs, had been rewarded with land after Bannockburn, though the Campbells had stolen most of this by Culloden. Our great heroes, Robert le Bruce and Wallace, grew up speaking 'French', sometimes to highly literate spiders. Scots were generally frowned upon by more civilised English, French, Germans, Dutch and Swedes, even in America. There was no romantic era. Life was hard and then you died. We had our own South Sea Bubble, a colony amongst pestilent natives and mosquitoes that died to a man-women jack, something we were good at. We invented modern money economics through a gambler (John Laws) and the Bank of France, though another Scot, Adam Smith, gets the credit for the meaningless mannered subject. These days, huge numbers of us live where it rains less, though the five million left want a Scandinavian-style social democracy, even though our old folk let us down by voting against independence. Alexander Graham Bell stole the telephone from someone else and Logie Baird built a mechanical television. David Hume spoke some sense and there was a decent grave-robbing business around Edinburgh, which has gay lawyers and a decent French bistro and zoo with a very annoying sea lion. Maxwell did as much as anyone to give us modern science. We speak English rather better than the English as we have good schools. I rather like the English as they once banned bagpipes. So are you guys proud of your countries or in lament? I'm off over the sea to Skye. There's a toll. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
