A Singular Episode

I've been reading for days. Slogging through miles of verbiage purporting to prove my perfidy.

How base,How shameful,How critical am I.
 
The modern mantra for municipal politics  is obsequiousness. Subservient,submissive,servile, slavish  and nauseatingly cloy.

Prayerful righteousness is de rigeur.

Codes of Ethics. Codes of Conduct are the modern form of puritanism.A declaration of "Holier Than Thou"

Generally speaking , a poor excuse for a man and still less for any self-respecting female.

I believe it's a legacy of the class system in the U.K. Everyone  expected to know his place.

Not so much in Scotland. The natives there are  notoriously independent of thought and  stubbornly egalitarian. They are at their most dangerous when calm and polite.

It has  to do with harsh climate, I think. The lashing rain The force of winds that  literally blow a person backwards or drive a river against the flow, back to it's source. The cold that seeps into your bones and takes hours to leave. The lowering ever- threatening sky that breaks occasionally to let a shaft of sunlight slice through like a shining spear; to momentarily light the hills that rise to peaks wherever your gaze falls.

I'm convinced, the craggy, rugged, sometimes barren ,magnificent nature of the place and its location, close to the top of the world, have an influence on a people's character.

Centuries of hardship have shaped us. A crust has formed.

Scottish folk take nothing for granted.They need to know why.  They can be persuaded. But not easily.

They never give up the fight. Never lay down the sword. It runs in their veins.It's a matter of survival. It's a life force.

Rabbie Burns wrote a bitter epic  called Holy Wullie's Prayer.  It wasn't chosen for classroom study. Rab was a genius. That was accorded.  But he was nobody's idea of a saint. Certainly Sister Eugenius  and  Sister Alphonsus did not approve. Although to tell the truth, the subject was never raised.

To be sure, villainy and excess permeates society  in any age.

Once there was an occasion, at the council table, when  the two women, side by side, at the head of the table  chatted comfortably together about town business at hand. They chatted and chatted.  Council and  a phalanx of directors present were a captive audience with no lapse in the requirement  for order and decorum

Any attempt to interrupt the flow would inevitably be greeted with the  ferocious  glower and the long-suffering  deprecating tone  familiar to all

"Councillor Buck, you are interrupting"

The situation  reached the point where, in a purely  instinctive and spontaneous gesture, I slid down  to a reclining position in my chair and pulled my jacket over my head. It caused a  stir on the opposite side of the table and eventually broke up the tete-a-tete at the head.

Wayne Jackson, the public works director told me later of a  practice by fans of a  rugger team in the U.K. When the team was  playing badly, the fans pulled  paper bags over their heads.

It was a minor episode. Hardly worth mentioning. Except I remember it with fondness.

 It's often used  as an example of my lack of respect for the Office of Mayor and  the obligation of Councillors to  respect  each others difference.