Showing off!

A marvellously Scottish fauxtation, I think, for us today. It comes from my friend Lesley McDonald:

"You can get away with murder, but you can't get away with showing off."

Lovely. For me that's an excellent reminder that it's not so much the big, dramatic, yet less frequent things that impact our daily lives. The smaller, everyday things do too. The ways we behave towards others, for example. They can be insidious since their familiarity makes them easy to overlook. But they always come back to bite you in the bum.

Being fastidious and thorough is a very Scottish trait. The devil's in the detail, and Scots do detail very well. That's probably had something to do with the great engineers, economists, imperial administrators and so on that came out of Scotland in the past.

Such a culture is not as ready as certain others to accept boundaries being constantly expanded for the sake of nothing but boundary expansion. Purpose is required. Scotland's certainly got its problems - we consume too much in the way of drink and sweeties. But fundamentally it's a very principled country. It was the Moderator of the Church of Scotland who responded to Margaret Thatcher's remark that "There's no such thing as society," by saying "You see, Prime Minister, for us there's nothing BUT society."

The little things matter. They're here with us every day. So you need to keep an eye on them if you want to keep a handle on your principles.