Monday, 25 February 2013

Transgenic Scotts

I have already once expressed here my impression on the strange relationship Scotts have with cold. Since then I just came to accept that Scotts are transgenic people: they don't feel cold in the same way that we, traditionally organic people do. You see them jogging in the snow, go out at night in a t-shirt and even leave home to go shopping in their flip-flops. All these are things that I have grown used to see in my every day life. Even though I still stare a wee bit, I have grown used to it.
One thing, however, that I haven't grown used to is the cold at home. I would guess, before I moved to Edinburgh, that all the houses in locations this far North would have well insulated double-glazed windows. Well, maybe they do in Norway but certainly not here!
Well today I was in conference on Environment and there was a representative there of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. We had discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the many forms of energy so I posed the obvious question: why isn't proper insulation compulsory. Now, the SEPA guy gave a vague answer on conciliation of interests but a lawyer there present gave what top me was a very different answer. He said that he would like his grandchildren to see the Georgian windows, how the sun shines through them and how their ancestors built them! I guess he wasn't very concerned with waking up feeling that his ears might fall with the cold or that his nose had gone numb...
There you have the proof that they are transgenic: they want their grandchildren to see how their Georgian ancestors had the windows. I, on the other hand, would prefer my grandchildren not to have pneumonia...

Saturday, 16 February 2013

Scottization...

Every day, since September, when I arrive to School in the morning, the janitor of the building nicely saluted me with what I always thought was a "morning, Bob"! Now, this made me feel very uncomfortable because I'm not Bob. My simple conclusion was that either the man was mad or we was mistaking me by someone else.
Because for 5 months the man kept calling me Bob, I had already asked to a number of Scottish friends what he might mean by that but no one could provide me with a satisfactory answer.
The answer finally came last week not from a Scott but from an Italian. He wasn't calling me Bob, he was calling me the Scottish version of pal, which is something like pol. But to me it really sounded like Bob, right?
That changed my relationship with the nice man! Now not only I answer with a good morning, as I already did, but I also comment on the weather... My fear is that if it took me five months to understand pal, how long will it take me to understand all the other words I still don't understand?