Sunday, 7 June 2009

Scotland doesn't exist

Well, what a pleasant couple of weeks away that was. No chance to read the papers or browse the web, barely a thought given to football or politics...have I missed much while I was away?

On my travels in the misty Carpathian mountains of Romania I was fortunate enough to purchase the stamp shown below. It's one of last year's stamps for letters to Europe (and has recently been replaced by a fetching picture of some storks). Now I'm not usually very interested in stamps but look again closely...isn't there something missing there...?



I guess this is all part of the Union dividend - invisibility to the outside world.

Not content with seeing Scotland the victim of a bad Romanian stamp (again) I also had the near impossibility of an unpleasant conversation with a Finnish lady. "Where are you and your wife from?" she asked. "Scotland and Germany", I replied. "Ah, England and Germany", she mis-repeated. For the sake of international relations I resisted my more bloodthirsty instincts and let it slide.

One day, hopefully soon, such irritations of Scottish invisibility will be a thing of the past.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Scotland is far from invisible. I would just put that lady among the cartographically-challenged and give her a special place to park her car.

forfar-loon said...

Aye, or give her one of those SatNavs, maybe a Tam-Tam :oD