The Glorious 12th - Scottish trivia

Scot here, blog and FB followers.

Today is "The Glorious 12th" of August.  For those NOT from Scotland I can inform you it is, or at least was, an eagerly awaited date in the year of Gentlemen who fanciend themselves as the Great White Hunter.

It is the opening of the Grouse Season in Highlands.  Millions of sweet, comical, beautiful, laughing grouse are currently daubing themselves in mud and moss in an attempt to evade the keen eyes of "the guns" and the associated shot.

Most of these Gentlemen came, in Victorian times, to "their estate in the Highland" to rid the place of birds, deer, otters, and sometimes with a bit of luck, any other "guns" who stood down wind of the buckshot.

Sam and I have headed south into Sassenach land, well, Yorkshire actually ( a people very like Highlanders in many ways but with all the humour wrung out) having left behind Pop Pop and her boyfriend (our tame partridges) in the hope that they will not get shot.  They being also in the grouse family.

We'll head into York tomorrow.  A fine city, nay the finest city in England, if not Britain.  She has posed the question as to whether it may be a future tour location.  MacKenzie Adventures conquers England?

For myself, I can't see it.  I break out in a hive of sweaty boils and expletives when I come to England.  A reaction against all the... well Englishness.

That said, we are yet in Yorkshire, which is hardly England.  It is Yorkshireland!  And they are our cousins in dourness and general disdain of "saft Southerns".

Scot