The Full Scottish

I have spent three weeks trying to understand Scotland through empire, sectarianism, football, churches, migration and the law.

I may have been overthinking it.

I should have ordered breakfast.

While waiting for a train to Glasgow, I ordered a full Scottish breakfast in the station café.

The waitress looked at me.

“You sure look like you’re from here,” she said. “But you don’t sound like it.”

There was not enough time before the train to explain forty-four years in Canada.

Fortunately, the breakfast required less explanation.

Egg. Bacon. Sausage. Black pudding. Haggis. Beans. Tomato. Mushrooms. Toast. Tattie scone.

Nothing was missing.

This was not breakfast accompanied by several side dishes.

This was breakfast with supporting witnesses.

None of it was unfamiliar. I have always known the separate parts of a full Scottish breakfast. This was not a tourist cautiously investigating the local cuisine.

I knew what I was getting into.

The tattie scone may be the finest example of Scottish practicality on the plate. Somebody looked at a potato and decided it should also become bread.

No announcement was made.

They flattened it, fried it and moved on.

Then there is square sausage.

Most countries accept that sausages are round. Scotland examined the matter independently and reached a different conclusion.

Round sausage rolls around.

Square sausage stays where it is put.

This is engineering.

The beans, meanwhile, refuse to stay where they are put. They may begin beside the egg, but soon they are soaking the tattie scone and approaching the toast.

Eventually, the entire breakfast becomes beans featuring several local attractions.

Black pudding remains the exception.

I have never been able to stomach it.

This is not an intellectually coherent position. I will happily gobble haggis—a dish traditionally cooked inside a sheep’s stomach—then draw the line at black pudding as though standards have suddenly become important.

It makes no sense.

I stand by it.

As for sauce: red or brown?

Neither.

Extra salt and pepper.

This may violate local custom. No one stopped me.

I ate while keeping an eye on the time.

The train came.

I boarded for Glasgow looking like I was from here, sounding like I wasn’t, and carrying no new theory of Scotland.

Only the pleasant certainty that I would not need lunch.

Giff on the Way Home.