ABERDEEN is where the self-sealing envelope and the iron lung were invented and it's where Scotty from Star Trek used to go on pub crawls (or will go on pub crawls, because he hasn't been born yet).
As for great culture, all I can remember from my childhood in Aberdeen is a pantomime starring Ted Rogers from television's 3-2-1. It seemed to me that culture was something you left Aberdeen to find and it's no surprise that the city has lost its bid to become UK City of Culture 2017. The judges described the artistic and cultural expertise in the city as limited.
But it's not all bad. Look hard – really quite hard – and you will find, amid the dreariness, some little cultural delights, as well as some examples that are best avoided.
A good, albeit low-brow, place to start is the call-centre sketch by the Flying Pigs, a comedy act from Aberdeen. The sketch features a Doric-speaking man called Mr Duguid who is moving house and has called a call centre in England to tell them.
The problem is Mr Duguid is moving from Dalziell Gardens to Garioch Road and his mother's maiden name is Farquhar. "My mither was a Farquhar, her faither was Farquhar, I come from a long line of Farquhars!"
A bad place to get started is Lewis Grassic Gibbon, unless you particularly love very long, very dreary novels about suicide, stroke, incest, death and ploughing. Mr Gibbon sometimes causes confusion with visitors to Aberdeen because of the road sign just south of the city that says "Gibbon Centre". He was a writer, not a monkey.
There are some other famous Aberdonians who've made important, quirky and ridiculous contributions to culture. My favourite is Walford Bodie, also known as The Electrical Wizard. He's forgotten now but he was a sensation all over the country in the 19th century. The highlight of his act featured him passing electrical currents of tens of thousands of volts through his body, or appearing to do so. He would hold a light bulb in his hand and switch it on with the current in his fingers. He was so famous that Charlie Chaplin impersonated him.
There are other Aberdonians I should mention. Lord Byron was brought up in the city, for example, although he left when he was 10. And there's Annie Lennox. And Emeli Sande, pictured. And Michael Gove of course. Yes. Sorry. Aberdeen is responsible for him too.
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