Next Saturday Scotland’s rugby team play England at Twickenham. Before the game the Scots team will deliver a self-inflicted wound.
They will sing that depressing dirge Flower of Scotland.
When a battle cry is needed, this isn’t it. The tune is too slow. Too many lines end on a down-note. It sucks the life out of you.
The lyric tells of a battle 700 years ago. Even though it was a victory, it sounds like a defeat, a lament for young men that fought and died for.
They battled for just a wee bit hill and glen. And no timescale is given, it appears, for when we will see their like again.
The second verse is even more hopeless. “And in the past they must remain”. Well, there’s no point in even trying, then.
By the time the third stanza drags on about “autumn leaves lying vacant still”, I expect any formerly red-blooded Scot is reduced to melancholic inertia.
I’ve heard Flower of Scotland described as dignified.
That’s no use. You aren’t given silverware for dignity. I want a Scottish team, in any sport, to believe it can win.
Then there are the ridiculous children (though most are grown men) yodelling “proud who?” when King Edward II is be mentioned. It is embarrassing. If anything, they are celebrating proud Edward. I cringe when people do this.
We need to re-think the idea of an anthem, what it is about, and what it should achieve.
Firstly, we need something with an upbeat, uplifting tune. Because an anthem should straighten spines and jut jaws. It is something to be belted out. It should lift fists to punch the air.
Flower of Scotland? An anthem should unite us
Secondly, the lyrics. Misty glens and heather-clad mountains are fine for tourists, but that’s not the Scotland most of us know.
We should sing of the steel foundries of Motherwell, Clydeside shipyards, coal mines of Fife and Lanarkshire, paper mills of Aberdeen, and jute mills here in Dundee.
The heavy industries in which our grandfathers and grandmothers forged an unbreakable work ethic that, I’d like to think, the best of us still have within us.
But here’s the important thing. I don’t want a song that preaches nationalism or unionism or even hints at these things.
Independence will happen, or it won’t. For the purposes of choosing a national anthem it utterly doesn’t matter. An anthem is a thing that must unite us, not cause division.
Hold whatever political beliefs you like. But, before anything else, we’re all Scottish.
Flower of Scotland is a symptom of what I believe is a damaging trait of too many Scots. It is an inward-looking, backward-looking, maudlin whinge.
That’s not how I see Scotland. We should be, must be, a modern, confident, outward-looking country.
Surely, somewhere in a nation filled with creative people, there is a composer who can find an air to lift the head then write lyrics that stir the heart?
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