This Standard Scottish Life

Haggis! I cry.  Haggis. Oh my God, Le Chef,  look there is Haggis with the baggage handlers.  Haggis! HAGGIS!    I am distraught.  I weep into my Executive Class G&T.

For those of you who don’t know, Haggis is not a Scotchish pudding made of lamb lung, bits o’ balls, stuffed in a stomach and butchered on Burns Night.  Well … OK …a Haggis is that but Le Vrai Haggis is my bicycle that took me across America.  You should really try and keep up people! C’mon now!

We are in the plane at Heathrow (a.k.a Hellrow) waiting to leave to go to Edinburgh.  I can see Haggis in her bag outside the plane on a baggage truck.  The baggage handlers seem to be reluctant to put her in the plane and Oh no! They are taking her away.  I shout,  Yes, this IS THE PLANE.  Just put the ruddy thing IN THIS PLANE.  But they don’t hear me and they drive away with Haggis towards an Aeroflot jet.  Haggis is off to the Gulag.  She was a good bicycle, only two punctures and some knackered ball bearings.  Doesn’t really deserve the Ivan Denisovich treatment.

I glug down a vodka.

Zooming along a Nova Scotian motorway, Le Chef complains about the incessant droning from my iTouch.

But it is my most favourite, favourite cycling song in the whole world.  I listened to it at least a zillion times on my trip.

Yeah, but I don’t want to hear it more than once.

I pout.  Only cyclists would get why it’s such a great song.  I switch the radio on.

…. 200 passengers stranded at Halifax airport as FlyZoom plane is impounded …

Eh … that’s our plane.  The plane we fly home on tonight.

…  as the company goes into receivership.

When an airline goes bankrupt you have to find your own way home.  It can be kinda difficult to get home when trying to secure two single flights from the Nowhere Scotia, Canada to WetPlace Glasgow, Scotland especially when it’s a holiday weekend in both Umerica and Kanadia.  We head to the Air Canada desk.

Yup, next economy flight I have available is on Tuesday night (today is Thursday).  But that’s no good for us coz Le Chef has to be somewhere in Skotchland that day.

So tonight?  What flights tonight?

Let me see.  Yes, I have two seats.  Halifax to Toronto to Hellrow to Edinburgh.  Leaving in two hours.

It’s a bit backwards to go to Toronto and it’s a bit hellish to go to Heathrow where there is the evil blackhole that sucks luggage.

OK.  How much for two tickets?

That will be $7140.  

I whimper.  My credit card whimpers.  

Le Chef instructs me, Give the man the card. Let’s go home.

I whimper some more.  Sparks issue from the credit card.

A glass of champagne or two in the Maple Leaf Executive Lounge and all concern over how to pay for £3500 worth of flights is forgotten.

Yes, my toe is green.  I bet you don’t have a green toe, unless of course you are a Green Toed Toad.  But I don’t think Green Toed Toads can read so it’s quite unlikely that you, dear reader/spam generating monster, have a green toe.

I should clarify.  The green toe is my big toe.  My big toe on my right foot.  And it’s not my whole toe that is green.  The green-ness is under my toenail.   I don’t think the green is gangrene coz there is no bad smell.  Yet.

My green toe is not sore.  But the right hand side of the nail is no longer properly attached to my toe.  That doesn’t seem quite right.  And the nail makes a kinda “I am a very dead nail” sound when I prod at it.

I am going to consult my local medical expert (aka The Wikipedia) about The Green Toe.  I shall report back.

I need beer, I am dying, exaggerated Le Chef. Le Chef he has the man flu. So to keep him quiet and reduce whining I agree to go to the supermarket to get him some beer. I have heard that Nova Scotia has some very fine ales.

Supermarkets in foreign countries are such fun with all the unfamiliar produce. While in the supermarket I participate in the corn-on-the-cob husking ritual. What a scream! What a mess! Then I hang out at the bakery section looking in awe at the phosphorescent blue and yellow and green iced cakes. They are quite scary. And then with excitement I search out the local beers. I am quite expert at beer purchasing having spent many hours inside gigantic beer fridges in America.

But where is the beer? I must have missed it in all the cake viewing wonder.

I go back to the beginning of the supermarket. The beer is not near the corn. Neither is it near the fizzy drinks. Nor is it beside the cleaning fluids. Hmmm, I don’t see wine either and no spirits. Is this a Mormon or Islamic supermarket? I wonder. I ask the man stacking shelves where the beer is.

No beer.

No beer?

Nope, no beer.

What do you mean “No beer”? How can there be “No beer”?

I start to fret, does he mean no beer in all of Nova Scotia? Has the beer, like the oil, run out? No beer. It is a concept that I cannot fathom.

Oh my god NO BEER! The end is nigh. HELP! HELP! HELP! NO BEER!

To purchase the off sale alcoholic beverages one must go to the NSLC shop. All off sale alcohol is controlled by the Provence. How Very Prohibition. It is of course quite inconvenient for me to get to the special liquor store so I take my bicycle and two empty panniers and load up with as much beer and Reisling as I can. There’s a world wide shortage dontcha know. So much for Nova Scotia’s Intelligent Consumption stance. Silly buggers.

I was gone …. well not really gone.  Just busy for several years planning and doing something else that involved doing Unstandard Scottish things.

But now I am back doing Standard Scottish things.  Except it’s not quite Standard today coz I find myself in Québec, in Canada.       Quebec.  It’s not very standard either. It’s French but not standard French.  Not French as you and I et Les Francais understand it.   If I adopt the worst imagineable French accent i.e. speak French with a Glaswegian accent while simultaneously blowing bubbles into my beer with a straw,  and make up some French sounding vocabulary  I can just about make myself almost understood.  The Le Vrai Francais i.e. the French French are all crying in the street at hearing Le UnVrai Francais.

Le Vrai Francais disent,  Sacre  bleu!  La langue de ma mere c’est défilé.  C’est butcheréd.  Nous will set les flics de la langue on vous.

I have had enough of this.  I am leaving now.  For Nouvelle Ecosse (Nova Scotia) where hopefully they speak Engerlish something like how I speak Engerlish.