Sunday, May 17, 2009

Lend Us a Fiver Till Tuesday, Ah'm Absolutely Skint*

Time once again for the Victoria Highland Games, and once again Victoria enjoys the sunniest, warmest day we’ve had this year (just like last year!). Temperatures reached 20°C (a now-sweltering 68°F!). Man have I ever acclimated.

The Saturday portion of the Games is kind of the “warm up” for the big day tomorrow, when the serious competitions take place (men with no necks doing grunty things like the Caber Toss, the Stone Put and the Hammer Throw, while on the other stage we have little girls dancing).

Today we saw some falconing, sheepdog herding competition, sheep shearing (yes, real live sheep shearing), and marching bands practicing.

I put up a few photos into a Facebook album (updated 18-May), you don’t have to join to have a look thank goodness. There are things I like about FB, but it’s a ridiculous amount of work versus reward and they keep changing the damn thing.

This year’s games have even more of a Scottish presence then usual, as the Scottish Tourism Council is exceptionally keen to get people of Scots descent to come visit this year, the excuse being that it’s the 250th birthday of Robert Burns (and nothing to do with the worldwide economic downturn, no not at all).

When chatting about this with a bona-fide Scotsman of my acquaintance whom I ran into there (fancy that!) he scoffed at the idea of going to Scotland to honour Mr. Burns and instead justified his own upcoming trip by pridefully pointing out how cheap it was.

Now that’s a fookin’ Scot!

*the title of this post comes from the great but fictional Scottish poet Ewan McTeagle. Bonus points if you knew that.

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