Hey pals,
One of my favorite things about Glasgow is that everyone calls you pal, even when they don’t know you. Like when you’re boarding a bus and you scan your ticket the driver will say “cheers, pal”. It’s a nice way of living. We should all be pals.
Hello from the beautiful gloom that is Scotland in the wintertime. I love the way that all the streets smell like malt here, that everything is made of stone. The morning light is a little dim, and everyone wears dark colors. It’s a bit Wednesday Adams, but only if she also played the fiddle.
Every time I come to Scotland I am transported back to a very formative time in my life, age 20, when I came here to study for a semester at the University of Edinburgh. To say I was a misfit at that time, at school in Nashville, would be an understatement. I almost didn’t exist. But Scotland, socially, was easy. It made sense. There was fiddle music everywhere. People at school wanted to talk about literature, politics, and anthropology, visit museums, and go traveling. My four Scottish flatmates were 17-18 years old and could drink me under the table. It was an education in more ways than one.
Last night I sat in the hotel lobby drinking Scotch and listening to a Cajun accordion player from Louisiana hold court with a few beautiful Scottish lasses; He played, and they adored. I thought about how we romanticize the foreign, and how it helps us place ourselves in context. It can be hard to be foreign, and it can also be a superpower.
To be far from home is to be placed into a context that only you are aware of. Your setting is completely shifted, and suddenly you have to see what it is that is missing The zoom-out capability is powerful.
For me, it’s brought a bit of gratitude, a reminder of how stoked my twenty-year-old self would have been to be here on this tour. And my thirty-three year old self is also stoked. As we depart for England tomorrow, I’m gonna try to take that context with me.
I’ve only been to Scotland once, but I loved it. The cities have so much history, and the countryside is so beautiful! Completely off topic I was hoping you would have a show near me, but when you are in Philly it is on Super Bowl Sunday. I saw you will also be in Glenside, PA, but it is the day after we leave on vacation. Hopefully some other time we will be able to catch you live. Have a great European tour!