Jings! Crivens! Help Ma Boab!

In a move sure to delight the Scottish among you we elected to attend a Festival of the Hibernian, ironically in the Southern marches of the city, where we were promised a cornucopia of Highland Dancing, Marching Bands, and more Haggis than we could shake a caber at.

With dubious hopes we arrived to be greeted firstly by a car park attendant demanding money, then by a ticket attendant demanding money, then by the braw tones of the Proclaimers wafting over the gloaming as we made our way onto a sports field flanked by what passes for entertainment here - to whit market stalls, demanding money - and a stage upon which a group of no doubt Scottish performers performed Scottish songs, by the Proclaimers.

We toured the stalls, and Jings! Crivens! Help ma boab! there was a tea towel with 'Jings! Crivens! Help Ma Boab!' written on it, which I felt compelled to purchase.

The Disclaimers ceased operations to make way for recorded highland tunes to which some local girls performed Highland Dancing, as advertise, while we refreshed ourselves with Irn Bru and Haggis, basking in the malevolent airs of deeply fried food and dubiously cooked meats before perusing more stalls as some dodgy old bird, probably called Flora or Morag or something, began to lilt a Highland Anthem of some kind or other, dressed in all her plaid finery, selling by the side CDs with pictures of herself when she was in the flower of her youth.

Many a Mickle does a Muckle make, apparently, so I dawdled admiring dog-shaped doorstops and those hats that have ginger hair attached to them, and we did in a sort of linked way notice the lack of gingerness around the place, but soon the marching bands came out, hundreds of them (though I suspect they were actually Irish) playing rousing tunes upon their baggy pipes and barking orders to one another and twirling their drumsticks rousingly around.

So rousingly in fact that we decided that enough was enough and buggered off.