I've lived in England for the larger part of my life but in my own way I've tried to make life a
little bit like Scotland wherever I've lived. One way I've tried to
achieve this is subtly and indirectly to persuade those close to me that eating
lunch is having my dinner and sitting down to dinner is actually having
my tea. I have emphatically failed in this campaign and neither wife nor kids
would ever have it. I suspect that even my grandsons, one supports Hibs and the
other Raith Rovers, are so influenced by Anglicised culture - which to a
point is fair enough since their father is English and quite a big guy -
yes even with them I’d be flogging a dead horse with this.
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| NOT TEA! but a cup of tea at a hotel on the Isle of Arran |
Fretting over this, and hoping for an answer which would give me solace, I emailed a friend who lives in Edinburgh, and was a YES voter in the 2014 referendum to boot. I asked him directly.
"Are
the Scots still calling dinner, dinner and tea, tea ?"
He replied, and I quote him, "I actually still use tea, but, kicking and screaming I tend to have been pressured into having lunch instead of dinner."
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| TEA ! poshly known as high tea was served in the upstairs dining room of the long gone Heath Fish & Chip Shop, Montrose. This is not dinner! |
Well, I know friends and colleagues down here in Devon are flummoxed when a half hour after midday I say “I’m away for my dinner,” and my fellow quaffers at the Bull Inn in Totnes take on a collective questioning frown when at 6.30 pm I say, "I’m away to eat my tea.” Up to a point I can understand this. We are in England after all. But in Scotland ? Och! come on! "Pull yersels thegither !"
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| TONIGHT'S TEA - not so posh but OK |
Or am I the only person in the world whose mind lives in
1950s Scotland?
