A LADY AT LEISURE
‘A tartaned male is now the height of fashion, and everyone, it seems, wants one’
A lady at leisure T
WORDS FIONA ARMSTRONG ILLUSTRATION BOB DEWAR
here’s been a slight mid-life crisis in the MacGregor household: the chief has had another birthday. It’s not a biggie. In fact,
it’s a nothing-to-worry-about mini-milestone, and I comfort him with the fact that he can now travel by rail for £19 return anywhere in Scotland. My husband may have another year and a few more train trips to his credit, but he also has a new name, with which he is rather pleased – and few men would blame him. We have a friend who likes a few drinks
– don’t we all? – and after, well, quite a few, she decided to nickname him Sol: not after Solomon, king of the Jews, writer, poet, scientist, the so-called wisest man who ever lived; but because she reckons that, clad in his kilt, he’s pretty-much Sex On Legs. Yes, I know this is a family magazine, but I think I’m allowed to say that. And, after all, Scotland’s chiefs are regularly hot stuff: all that macho marching in Highland uniform; a pair of naughty knees constantly on show; those tickly feathers in a
jaunty cap; that small dagger peeping tan- talisingly from the
top of a sock… According to said
(English) friend, and quite a few of her English pals, a be- sporraned Highlander
now stands right up there with anything a swarthy Frenchman can offer. Indeed, a tartaned male is now the height of fashion – and every- body, it seems, wants one. Such a finding may lead to an undignified rush to the kilt shop. Get yourself some bagpipes while you’re there, chaps – we like a bit of romantic music and there’s nothing like ‘Highland Laddie’, or ‘Cock o’ the North’ to stir the spirit… Steady on, Fiona. The thing is, how many
women can you really be bothered with? King Solomon supposedly had 700 wives and 300 concubines. It must have been some size of a palace. And how on earth he found the time to write poems, discover clever things and mediate in disputes is beyond me. His name means ‘peace’, but I can’t imagine he’d have had much of that with all those females around… The MacGregor, meanwhile, with a mere two
wives to his credit, remains blissfully unstressed, and, with our friend’s words ringing in his ear, he now has a spring in his step – and why not? Chiefs are not meant to be dull. And when they’re boring, they can cause great disappointment. The 18th-century diarist Samuel Johnston
took a famous Hebridean tour with James Boswell. It was 1773, barely three decades after the romantic, if bloody, Jacobite uprising, and the pair hoped to find a land of loutish lairds roasting oxen whole. Instead, one of the people they found, Alexander Macdonald of Sleat, told them he did not carry too many weapons because they had a tendency to rust – and then he would have to clean them, which was a bore. The visitors noted with contempt that this
English-bred chieftain had obviously been ‘tamed into insignificance’. Their hoped-for rough-and-ready Highland day was turning out to be ‘little better than a blank’. It got worse: when they bumped into the Maclean chieftain, he asked them to kneel down and pray with him. The days when a chief walked out attended by a dozen followers, arms rattling, were gone. They still are. But watch this space – he can still look rather dashing…
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Scotsmen – at least the ones in kilts – are now rated equal to suave, swarthy Frenchmen in the romance stakes. What will this news do to a chief’s ego?
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