LIKE many Scots, I’ve a complicated relationship with tartanry and kilts. They’re quintessentially Scottish, but is tartan easy on the eye? Is the kilt morally uplifting?

A forthcoming book, Highland Style by Rosie Waine of the National Museum of Scotland, reopens the debate about the invention of tartan dress.

Latterly, revisionists have attributed its origin to wealthy toffs of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but Dr Waine believes the idea of such an invention is exaggerated, and that formal Highland dress emerged during the 16th and 17th centuries as ceremonial costume for lairds and their retinues.

Still toffs then. I’d always assumed the kilt had peasant origins, and that toffs based their ornate costumery on something pre-existing and more basic. That said, it’s unclear why rural peasants would prefer kilts to troosers. You’d think that, as you strode manfully across the wildlands with a heifer on your back, the long grasses would tickle your nadjers. Perhaps that’s why they preferred it.

While cogitating thus, I’d forgotten I’d written a memorable article about kilts in our Sunday paper’s Icons series, which stated authoritatively that the kilt was generally given a 16th century origin, and that the Romans recorded tartan being worn by Celtic warriors, possibly as trews.

More significantly, William Wallace wears a kilt in Braveheart, and that’s good enough for me. I suspect every bloke wore them back in the day, but the lairds had the ones with fancy colours, while the peasants wore hodden grey, the national colour of Scotland (we should have a grey flag to better represent our sky).

Like most Scots, I’ve only worn a kilt to a wedding, and can recall that, to borrow a line from Dad’s Army, you could fair feel the breeze around your Cairngorms. I recall also that, apart from a couple of lads with the legs for it, we all wore the kilts low and the socks high, to expose a minimum of pallid flesh. We looked more like 1950s female librarians than noble Highland warriors.

As for tartan, I’ve never been sure of the mixter-maxter of colours. As a follower of fashion – shut up, youse – I believe one colour is best. Gals have told me I suit black (possibly reflecting my gloomy personality) or, at a pinch, light blue. I like yellow best but find few occasions when a garment that colour is appropriate.

At any rate, clearly our forbears gave little thought to colour co-ordination, which shows how primitive they were. Or perhaps they thought the mixter-maxter of colours best suited the blotchy complexions of these pre-moisturising days.

At Highland-style events, or nationalist gatherings, you see bearded blades wearing plain, hodden grey kilts in the belief that these are more authentic. They could be on to something.

We Scots are not a colourful people. Once, I painted a garden fence blue, and it was the talk of the steamie for months. And this in a cod-Nordic Scottish island where, like everywhere else in Scotland, any wooden buildings were just left brown rather than painted.

But I like colour, me. And, as a patriotic Scot, I shall eschew kilts of any tartan and stick to light blue slacks and a bright yellow blazer.

A beard is for life

POLICE officers in yonder Ireland have been scolded for having scruffy beards that are neither one thing nor another.

An inspector’s report claims some officers “cannot seem to make up their minds” about having a beard or being clean-shaven, resulting in scraggy stubble. The report said the faces of such officers resembled “a badly watered lawn in a heatwave”.

It is a harsh criticism. But it’s true you have to commit to a beard. And, once you have a full one, you have either to keep it forever or to ditch it quickly. If you keep it on for any reasonable time, the skin underneath will turn sallow and hideous.

I know this from experience. Once, on an island where few people knew me, I decided to ditch my beard. This was many years ago, when I was middle-aged and impulsive.

I’d grown a right big thick thing, and took it off in stages. At each stage, I looked handsomer and handsomer, relatively speaking. Relative to a matamata turtle.

But I was definitely improving with each trim, yea, even unto the penultimate one. But when I took that off, the result was hideous. It wasn’t just the pallor. I’d forgotten about the cleft on my chin which resembled the Grand Canyon.

Some people say a cleft chin is an attractive feature. But mine looks like a giant set of buttocks on the bottom of my face, or indeed a giant bottom on the buttocks of my face.

I couldn’t go out in public for days, till at least a reasonable amount of stubble grew back and, returning to work, everyone said how much better I looked without the full Assyrian.

Nowadays, like the rural Irishmen of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman who had become half-man half-bicycle, I look upon myself as a beard with a wee man attached. And that’s how matters coupon-side shall remain.

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