It was another dreich day, and my stiff denims sucked up the damp from the pavement.
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"I'm quite bold, that's part of why I'm a blender," Barrie cheerfully says of her position on a typically dreich Scottish day in early February.
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"It's a bit dreich [dreary]," says one of them, eyeing the weather in Insch, a grey Aberdeenshire village, where it has been raining, off and on, all day.
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A scene of winter woods, drenched in grey mist—or what the Scots call dreich—is the backdrop for an account of the year 1992, when Ms Prodger was 18 and working in an old people's home in rural Aberdeenshire before she came out.
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I wanted to make use of both, and to do this I provided a glossary of 10 fabulously expressive Scots words used today (bauchle, blether, dreich, fankle, gallus, mooch, pockle, slitter, wabbit, wheescht), but also spoke to the class about how they spoke and what regional phrases they had in their armory.
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It's a dreich and miserable place, a landscape of abandoned fridges and cookers, a windswept, unkempt, thistly moor.
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Elizabeth Elliott's translation retains a Scottish flavour – the season is dreich, gods are crabbit and jewels are bonny – and has an easy conversational flow, with the odd rhyme showing through.
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However it can be very changeable, and normally a few degrees colder than southern England. Mornings can be damp and misty, or "dreich" (a Scottish word for damp and drizzly) and by afternoon sunny and warm. Spring (March to May) is fairly mild and is a popular time to visit Glasgow. Though some days are rainy and windy, Many of Glasgow's trees begin to flower at this time of the year and Glasgow's parks and gardens are filled with spring colour.
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One such convention was the inclusion of the didactic moral lesson in a moralitas (plural moralitates) inserted after the fable. Henryson follows and develops this convention. By today's standards most surviving fable literature is gey dreich, partly because fable writing was a common classroom exercise. Students might be asked to learn fable plots to retell them in contracted or expanded form – modo brevitur and modo latius respectivelyEdward Wheatley "Scholastic Commentary and Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis: The Aesopic Fables" Studies in Philology 91, University of North Carolina Press, 1994. pp.
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The short intro, "Born in a Storm", melodic and interspersed with an unmistakably gloomy atmosphere created by the name, launches into the title track "Raintown", a natural extension of this plot. The weather remains a feature of the atmosphere of the album, reflecting the epitome of the Scots word dreich. Played out in the course of the album is the struggle with money ("Loaded"), unemployment, dreams of something better ("Dignity", "The Very Thing"), culminating in an angry attack upon urban life ("Town to Be Blamed"). The album does feature lighter experiences though, with the love songs ("Chocolate Girl") and "Love's Great Fears" - a track that Ross has often cited as his all-time favourite, featuring a slide guitar outro by Chris Rea.
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