Ever been to the Kippen Street Fayre? Didn’t think so. Ever wish you had paid attention back in school when they talked about that crazy, sometimes-a-vowel “y”, and now, several decades later, you stammer when a pretty girl comes up to you in a bar and says “I’ll go home with you tonight if you can give me three words in which the letter “y” functions as a consonant?” Then you subsequently wonder what you’re doing in some weird bar where linguistic pick-up lines are the norm? Damn, I wish such a place existed. Then my spelling bee past might just score me a date with Jennifer Love Hugetits.
But it’s good to see Kippen kicking it old school in the naming of their annual festival. There used to be a “Ye Olde Taverne” in my hometown, which was just a sad attempt to throw in extra vowels to make something look, um, authentic I guess. The Tavern, excuse me, Taverne was, in turn, authentically empty….all the time. They probably scared off all their customers…they should have known that New Englanders are scared off by too many vowels.
But back in Kippen, there’s a fayre that’s certainly noteworthy enough that, spell check be damned, it’s better than fayre. Ah, puns…the binkie of sub-par writing; how you make me feel safe. Selling bread to the throngs of pasty locals that littered the streets from nine a.m. on, I was able to learn a bit more about the local food culture.
Mainly, that the Scots are pretty much set in their food ways. While I’m not learned enough to label every tradition with Latin-based psychology terms, these food ways drip down through generations, to the people that stood before me, trying to return their loaves of sourdough because they “obviously weren’t cooked enough. Why else would they be chewy like that?” Fair assessment, right? How can bread be the “staff of life” if it’s not hard enough to actually use AS a staff? Where were you for that gem, Professor Grieco? Or, towards the end of the fayre, when people knew that prices would go down to get rid of stock, they crouched at the edge of my tent like ball boys at a tennis match, waiting for their bargain. Damn, those Scots can run when there’s bread involved.
But in the long run, I fayred better in terms of collateral damage than my Mhor fish cohorts, losing only a few fairy cakes in the process. Side note: I never knew that foodstuffs could officially be homosexual. But let’s be honest…cupcakes are undoubtedly the drag queens of the cake world.
Heading over to the fried –food trailer, brushing the flour from my arms, I saw the ground splattered with so many oil stains that it looked like the aftermath of a cabana-boy training seminar. People were devouring fried haddock in a way that made me wonder if they loved the taste of fried foods, or just really hated haddock.
Surely it’s the former. Throughout my time in Scotland, I’ve come to see it as a kind of positively-charged ostrich philosophy with fried foods…if you can’t see it (because it’s covered with batter and deep-fried), then it must be good. Pizza, Mars bars (which is what we call a Milky Way…but that’s a whole other post), babies, (sorry, couldn’t help myself)…it’s just better when it’s deep-fried. Given the piss-poor quality of healthy eating in this country, I’m surprised fish & chip shops don’t offer deep-fried vitamins…the batter really helps the medicine go down. Now I’m wondering if I should’ve deep-fried those sourdough loaves. People would’ve looked at it, and said, “Hmm….yes, that seems about right. I’ll take two.”
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