The Gentleman's Club is the outstanding English contribution to civilisation. Within the portals of the Garrick Club, venerable thespians, such as Widow Twanky and Squire Hardup, rub shoulders with distinguished ecrivistes such as the late Kingsley Amis - still seated in his favourite seat in the corner - and my own good self. The Gentleman's Club is also an excellent place to hold forth (see also Forth, Holding). In White's, the members still devote the evening of every third Tuesday in the month to a discussion of the disgraceful behaviour of the miners under the wretched Mr Gormley, whilst in Boodle's they regularly place bets on the likely outcome of the 1963 general election.CRICKET. Oh sacred game! There are few pastimes your full-blooded Englishman enjoys more than spending an afternoon at Lord's, bantering with his peers over a couple of pints of best bitter, a ploughman's lunch, a punnet of Cornish ice cream, a plate or two of strawbugs and cream, four packets of cheese and onion, a banana float with thick choccy sauce, a Scotch egg, a pork pie and a bottle or two of halfway-decent claret. Once in a while, someone may score a run, but no true Englishman would ever allow this to distract him from the task in hand.. mong the saddest figures to appear on a platform beside the returning officer early on Friday morning was the candidate for the Braveheart Party, who called himself William Wallace and stood in Edinburgh Central.
He was dressed in a kilt with a plaid wound about his chest, and his face was painted with woad on one side. When the returning officer announced he had won 191 votes, he came forward and roared, as Mel Gibson had in the film from which his party took its name. "They may take our lives, but they will never take our fre-e-edo-o-om!" Someone in the audience clapped and cheered briefly, and the rest of the platform, including the candidate for the Scottish National Party, shuffled He was sad, but also useful. For he had done the service of pushing the fantasy a little too far and in doing so, revealing its tawdriness. Braveheart was a film which, for a while, seemed to have captivated Scotland. Football and rugby teams viewed it before big matches to give them spirit.
Alec Salmond, the SNP leader, regards it as his favourite film. But, in seeking to animate it for the Scottish parliamentary elections, the kilted, woaded fantasist made the film appear the tawdry thing it was.Most nations weave some sort of myth about themselves. It is often religion married to expansion - as the British one, notoriously, still is. "Send her victorious" and "Wider still and wider/Shall thy bounds be set" - many of us cannot bear to hear, let alone sing, these ludicrous boasts now, but they are still the official and quasi-official anthems. Scotland's myths were in some ways even more powerful (and certainly more fervently believed still) for being myths about a nation shorn of a state. The teeming imagination of Sir Walter Scott gave us much of "traditional" Scotland seen through a romantic nationalist haze; the 20th century added harder edges, sketching in a kind of proletarian nationalist sentiment centred on the Clyde.Neither was overtly political in the sense of proposing separation; that was left to the late-1960s and 1970s, when the SNP managed to fuse cultural with political nationalism as Labour and Conservative governments floundered, and then grew further in the Eighties as a Thatcher government cut hard against the corporatist Scots political culture. Braveheart was the florid and debased apogee of that - positing the Scot as the noble and tormented victim of an epicene yet sadistic race.
