I repeat. They could all be dead.
Inside the restaurant it’s a different story. It seats 24, but only if you are on elbow poking terms with your neighbours, and most of the diners, apparently, are. It’s packed. Red cheek to wobbly jowl. At the next table to ours are four white City women, two of whom are ‘weel at themselves’ which is Scottish for fat. They sit and swap finance tips, talking international bonds and markets the way those birds in Sex in The City discuss books and impotence. I’m terribly impressed and cowed, fairly falling into my bowl of mussels, until they start on about literature:
Oh you mustt have a favouritte author? Insists the pretty, thin one, annunciating her t’s with sharp Sth ‘Frican precision.
The fat white Kenyan one muses self-importantly like Rodin's The Thinker, then says in the tone of voice that heralds a Statement of Great Magnitude that her favourite book is the Anaed by Virgil. But it has a question mark at the end, so it sounds like a question. Maybe she’s unsure whether her companions, poor dears, have had a classical education.
It’s vary special, she says.
What's it about? asks Fat South African.
It's an epic poem, she says. That seems to be all she has.
Mmmm, say the others, nodding.
Silence.
Mmmm, they say again.
The Pretty girl then moves on to her next victim who is deer-in-the headlights stumped. Obviously every book she has never read has leapt over the fence and escaped into the forest and she just can’t think of anything to say, but relief floods across her face - EUREKA, Bambi's mother is down and she remembers one.
Rebecca, she clips, pronouncing it Ribika.
Aye rally lav that book, she adds.
Oooooh it’s a lavlie read, the others coo, such a lavlie book….
I’m thinking – it’s not lavlie, or even lovely – it’s a book about the Oedipus complex with strong lesbian homoerotic undertones, but they're talking about it like it's got Sunnybrooke Farm after the title.
The fat South African offers up Jane Oastin as her favourite author.
The others agree.
She’s rally special, says the pretty one. Rally, rally special.
Encouraged, the Fat South African elaborates: Oh…and Wuthering Heights… She’s written some lavely ones. I’ve seen all the ones on TV with the BBC up, you know?
I know.
I’ve gott itt, butt I haven’tt gott around tto reading itt yet. Says the Rebecca-lover (Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte NOT Jane Oastin, 1847 - what’s she waiting for….its 200th birthday?)
Then it was pretty girl’s turn.
Aye lav Sth American stuff. I rally enjoyed that book by Gabriel whatsisname… butt I can’tt remember the tatle. Itt’s a new one - it's just come outt. (note to readers Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera was published in 1985 - film released last month).
Aye well.
I could hardly drag my eyes off them to my beautifully frilled red mullet on its bed of butch purple broccoli . But somehow I managed.
Our next stop was Kirkaldy Farmers’ Market.
How do we get to Kirkaldy, asked Piers who was driving, bless him.
No it’s not Aldi like the supermarket it’s Awdy like Gawdy, I corrected him - by this point I'm turning into a real Slang Diction Bitch.
Yeah, whatever, so where is it? he asked (Such charm and grace the English).
The police man we stopped pointed in the same direction from which a large Pipe band was marching, so we parked and as the skirl of drums and pipes passed us by, I took the opportunity to wonder to myself what possible attraction as a weekend activity, beating a big drum with pom poms held for a very overweight woman on the wrong side of forty or an underfed girl of fifteen with piercings in her eyebrows and lips. Maybe I've answered my own question but it’s the having to wear white knee socks that would deter me, if nothing else.
The Farmers’ Market confused me. There was a stall selling:
Bratwurst, next to another selling
Salami, next to
Meats of the world, next to
Fromagerie chez Bertrand.
Then, in quick succession, one selling: Ponchos made of Llama wool, Nuts, Arabic Sweets, Savon de Provence, Pain de France, Gourmet coffee with fake hazelnut essence and Olives being sold by two men speaking loudly across the market to each other in eastern an European accent.
Bonjour says the greengrocer selling Spanish strawberries and French garlic to a man with a drinker’s nose and a North Face anorak while next to him there was a man in a full Indian Chief headdress, with pan pipes playing in the backgrounds flogging dream catchers, but with in broad Glaswegian.
Naw hen, this is the continental market, said a passer by when I asked. The Farmer’s market, an altogether much smaller affair was further up the road.
Just follie the pipe band, she said.
So we follied..
And there was the best of Fife and surrounding counties laid out before us – a fair smogarsboard of traditional local food: like, em.... Wild Boar,
and, diffident throat clearing, Buffalo.
Never in my life did I think I would hear a wee Scottish wifey in a headscarf and anorak asking a butcher if he had “any ordinary buffalo burgers?” When did buffalo start being ordinary in Scotland? Did I miss something? Where's the tatties and mince?
There was also venison, but even then it was burgured up for easy consumption and flavoured with everything from whisky to Irn Bru (actually I made the Irn Bru up - but it's only a matter of time).
Piers snapped a man in red tartan trousers standing in a smoke enveloped queue waiting to buy Arbroath smokies that were being cooked in a barrel next to the stall.
'You’re infringing that man’s human rights taking his photie like that,' said one of the women walking past in a herd like moody cows.
Aye Scotland - the land of the free - forget the highland clearances and give Amnesty International Political Prisoners Against Photography a call - a man had his photie taken without his knowledge. From the back.
Start the letter writing campaign to your MP now.
You know where Gordon lives...
Inside the restaurant it’s a different story. It seats 24, but only if you are on elbow poking terms with your neighbours, and most of the diners, apparently, are. It’s packed. Red cheek to wobbly jowl. At the next table to ours are four white City women, two of whom are ‘weel at themselves’ which is Scottish for fat. They sit and swap finance tips, talking international bonds and markets the way those birds in Sex in The City discuss books and impotence. I’m terribly impressed and cowed, fairly falling into my bowl of mussels, until they start on about literature:
Oh you mustt have a favouritte author? Insists the pretty, thin one, annunciating her t’s with sharp Sth ‘Frican precision.
The fat white Kenyan one muses self-importantly like Rodin's The Thinker, then says in the tone of voice that heralds a Statement of Great Magnitude that her favourite book is the Anaed by Virgil. But it has a question mark at the end, so it sounds like a question. Maybe she’s unsure whether her companions, poor dears, have had a classical education.
It’s vary special, she says.
What's it about? asks Fat South African.
It's an epic poem, she says. That seems to be all she has.
Mmmm, say the others, nodding.
Silence.
Mmmm, they say again.
The Pretty girl then moves on to her next victim who is deer-in-the headlights stumped. Obviously every book she has never read has leapt over the fence and escaped into the forest and she just can’t think of anything to say, but relief floods across her face - EUREKA, Bambi's mother is down and she remembers one.
Rebecca, she clips, pronouncing it Ribika.
Aye rally lav that book, she adds.
Oooooh it’s a lavlie read, the others coo, such a lavlie book….
I’m thinking – it’s not lavlie, or even lovely – it’s a book about the Oedipus complex with strong lesbian homoerotic undertones, but they're talking about it like it's got Sunnybrooke Farm after the title.
The fat South African offers up Jane Oastin as her favourite author.
The others agree.
She’s rally special, says the pretty one. Rally, rally special.
Encouraged, the Fat South African elaborates: Oh…and Wuthering Heights… She’s written some lavely ones. I’ve seen all the ones on TV with the BBC up, you know?
I know.
I’ve gott itt, butt I haven’tt gott around tto reading itt yet. Says the Rebecca-lover (Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte NOT Jane Oastin, 1847 - what’s she waiting for….its 200th birthday?)
Then it was pretty girl’s turn.
Aye lav Sth American stuff. I rally enjoyed that book by Gabriel whatsisname… butt I can’tt remember the tatle. Itt’s a new one - it's just come outt. (note to readers Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera was published in 1985 - film released last month).
Aye well.
I could hardly drag my eyes off them to my beautifully frilled red mullet on its bed of butch purple broccoli . But somehow I managed.
Our next stop was Kirkaldy Farmers’ Market.
How do we get to Kirkaldy, asked Piers who was driving, bless him.
No it’s not Aldi like the supermarket it’s Awdy like Gawdy, I corrected him - by this point I'm turning into a real Slang Diction Bitch.
Yeah, whatever, so where is it? he asked (Such charm and grace the English).
The police man we stopped pointed in the same direction from which a large Pipe band was marching, so we parked and as the skirl of drums and pipes passed us by, I took the opportunity to wonder to myself what possible attraction as a weekend activity, beating a big drum with pom poms held for a very overweight woman on the wrong side of forty or an underfed girl of fifteen with piercings in her eyebrows and lips. Maybe I've answered my own question but it’s the having to wear white knee socks that would deter me, if nothing else.
The Farmers’ Market confused me. There was a stall selling:
Bratwurst, next to another selling
Salami, next to
Meats of the world, next to
Fromagerie chez Bertrand.
Then, in quick succession, one selling: Ponchos made of Llama wool, Nuts, Arabic Sweets, Savon de Provence, Pain de France, Gourmet coffee with fake hazelnut essence and Olives being sold by two men speaking loudly across the market to each other in eastern an European accent.
Bonjour says the greengrocer selling Spanish strawberries and French garlic to a man with a drinker’s nose and a North Face anorak while next to him there was a man in a full Indian Chief headdress, with pan pipes playing in the backgrounds flogging dream catchers, but with in broad Glaswegian.
Naw hen, this is the continental market, said a passer by when I asked. The Farmer’s market, an altogether much smaller affair was further up the road.
Just follie the pipe band, she said.
So we follied..
And there was the best of Fife and surrounding counties laid out before us – a fair smogarsboard of traditional local food: like, em.... Wild Boar,
and, diffident throat clearing, Buffalo.
Never in my life did I think I would hear a wee Scottish wifey in a headscarf and anorak asking a butcher if he had “any ordinary buffalo burgers?” When did buffalo start being ordinary in Scotland? Did I miss something? Where's the tatties and mince?
There was also venison, but even then it was burgured up for easy consumption and flavoured with everything from whisky to Irn Bru (actually I made the Irn Bru up - but it's only a matter of time).
Piers snapped a man in red tartan trousers standing in a smoke enveloped queue waiting to buy Arbroath smokies that were being cooked in a barrel next to the stall.
'You’re infringing that man’s human rights taking his photie like that,' said one of the women walking past in a herd like moody cows.
Aye Scotland - the land of the free - forget the highland clearances and give Amnesty International Political Prisoners Against Photography a call - a man had his photie taken without his knowledge. From the back.
Start the letter writing campaign to your MP now.
You know where Gordon lives...
