The Scots tend to be rather self-congratulatory about their higher education. The creme de la creme can indeed excel, yet its average graduate’s skills can be modest: something like the second year of a Continental university. A scale of values that allocates high priority to drinking and clubbing, with a bit of loose change going on books, doesn’t make the heart rise up. A British colleague in a big German city commented on a recent draft of exchange candidates: “If that lot can read Hello!, they’re doing well.”
Scottish tourism is equally suspect: a potential £3-4bn-a-year business which is stuck about halfway there, mired in a tartan, bagpipes and haggis miasma, reached by only a tiny proportion of those who get as far as the London-Oxford-Stratford triangle and – having had quite enough of that – penetrate no further. Often for very good reason. Outside the filthy rich blowing their geld on Peter de Savary’s Skibo Castle, or at Gleneagles, much of what’s on offer in Scotland’s tourist areas dates from the 1960s, and reflects the destruction of the decade that brought the Beeching report and the closure of most country railways; the scrapping of the Clyde excursion steamers; some horrid urban redevelopment schemes; and dodgy tourist “attractions”, such as the now-crumbling Aviemore holiday centre.
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