St Andrews Day

 St Andrews Day

Across the moors and hills of  Bonny Scotland, they are celebrating St Andrews Day, a yearly tartan homage to everything that is quintessentially Scottish. They'll be dancing on the streets of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, the Firth of Forth, the Grampians, Dundee, the Highlands and practically every football team at the end of the Pools Coupon who wouldn't normally receive the kind of exposure or publicity at any time of the year apart from now. In Montrose, East Fife, Cowdenbeath, Queens Park, Inverness Caledonian, Queen of the South, Celtic and Rangers naturally, the eyes of the world are on Scotland.

Every year on the final day of November the good and noble citizens of the Scottish islands far and wide will abandon themselves to drinking, feasting, imbibing huge quantities of indigenous whisky, several tots of brandy and then jigging between swords at the White Heather club. Scotland will always be synonymous with Hogmany which ushers in the New Year and of course wild celebrations followed by several plates of haggis. 

But today the whole of Scotland will remember their most recent past; the persistent cries for independence from England, devolution and now continued involvement at the heart of any argument against or for Brexit. We love the Scottish bulldog spirit, the stubbornness in the face of any kind of adversity and just a fondness for producing one of Scotland's most finest poets Rabbie Burns. In a sense Burns is an embodiment of everything the Scots so treasure and will always do so.

My wife Bev and I paid a visit to a Burns museum in Dumfries a couple of years ago and the literature on display was truly priceless, beautifully written love letters, sonnets, poems and verses that genuinely came from the great poet's heart. We admired the man's enduring legacy for this was a man deeply proud of his identity and never afraid to express the depth of his feelings with a honeyed lyricism that may never be forgotten. 

But it's perhaps Scottish football teams who hold such an extraordinary appeal to those who barely acknowledge their existence and should know better. Scottish football has always been notoriously bad at times but then irresistibly brilliant when the mood takes them. Their now celebrated heritage has been well documented and extensively chronicled over the years and doesn't make for pleasant reading. Scotland were always the team everybody admired for a while during the 1970s and then allowed to fall into rack and ruin when the songs dried up and the boasts became nothing more than wishful thinking. 

In 1978 Ally Macleod became the face of Scottish football, a manager so blissfully deluded and overly optimistic that even his most neutral supporters would have advised him to choose alternative employment. The Macleod face during the 1978 World Cup Finals in Argentina was a picture of brooding melancholy, so desperately broken, sad and crestfallen that even his most sympathetic family members thought he should have taken the first flight home at the first opportunity.

At the end of a humiliating 3-1 defeat to Peru, Macleod buried his head in his hands in sorrow and just wanted a hole to swallow him up in the process. He grimaced in utter despair, the eyes sinking down towards the ground in gradual stages of suffering and inconsolable desolation. But Macleod was the one who confidently predicted with an almost arrogant assertiveness that Scotland would win the World Cup. And maybe he had a point because the Scots were valiant triers and nobody could blame them for lack of effort or purposeful endeavour.

Four years before, Willie Ormond had guided Scotland to their first World Cup Finals since 1958 but then struggled embarrassingly to beat Zaire before briefly redeeming themselves against Yugoslavia who themselves couldn't stop the mighty Brazil  qualifying from the group stages. The hosts West Germany would go on to win the 1974 World Cup against a criminally unlucky Netherlands in the World Cup but by now the Scots were back home contemplating the summer's Highland Games.

There were of course those notable landmarks in Scottish club football that could never be erased from the memory. Celtic and Rangers had always dominated the whole footballing landscape to the exclusion of any other top flight Scottish team. For decades the two Glasgow powerhouses would sweep all before them until Rangers fell from grace as a result of financial skulduggery and found themselves trapped into Scottish football's wilderness.

In 1967 Celtic set the precedent by becoming the first British club to win the European Cup, now the Champions League. Both the likes of Tommy Gemmell and Bobby Murdoch became the leading standard bearers and on a warm night in Lisbon both Gemmell and Murdoch would feature handsomely and prominently in a famous victory against Inter Milan of Italy in the European Cup Final.

Scotland of course, has always prided itself on its comedians, the most outstanding of whom was one Sir Billy Connolly, the man who came from the Glasgow shipyards and docks and carved himself into the Hall of Fame with the kind of outrageous behaviour that would become his trademark. Those of a sensitive disposition would be quick to dismiss the expletive laden vulgarities in his act as a sign of loose morals and little class. But Connolly, now sadly laid low with Parkinson's disease, will always be highly regarded as the most stunningly accomplished comedian Scotland have ever produced.

But for those who remember those days of yesteryear, Scotland was all about New Year's Eve and Hogmany on BBC One and ITV when British TV had to content itself with only three channels. There was Andy Stewart bedecked with tartan kilt and accompanying bag pipe players who would then be joined with much merriment and boozy laughter by various folk singers and general jollity, with Moira Anderson on the other channel. So to Scotland we hope you've had the most magnificent day and hope that St Andrews Day was just as warmly satisfying as it's always been.