Boston: America's Tartan Antidote

19/06/2026

There is something happening in Boston just now that feels bigger than football.

Scotland are back at the World Cup. That sentence alone is enough to make any Scottish person of a certain vintage feel a wee pull in the chest. Not the dramatic kind. Not sombre pipes and slow-motion footage of a child looking at a Saltire in the rain. Just that old ache of recognition.

We. Are. Back.

Somehow. Against the odds. Against history. Against ourselves, most likely.

And with Scotland as always have come the Tartan Army.

Not a fanbase exactly. Not in the modern, branded sense. Not content creators. Not consumers. Not influencers with ring lights and choreographed joy. Just thousands upon thousands of Scots descending on Boston like a weather system made of lager, songs, flags, sunburn, gallus humour, emotional damage and very good manners when it matters.

They have taken over the city. The streets, the bars, Fenway Park, the public spaces, the local imagination. Everywhere you look, there they are. Kilts, strips, flags, songs, daft dancing, bad knees, worse hangovers, and that strange open-faced Scottish madness that somehow manages to be both deeply unserious and completely sincere.

And the thing that caught me was not even the football.

It was a woman from Boston talking about the Scottish men.

She did not say the women of Boston had fallen in love with them because of the kilts. Not because of the accents. Not because of some Outlander fantasy pish about rugged Highland masculinity and windswept thighs.

She said it was because around the Scots they felt they could be themselves.

Completely themselves.

Silly. Loud. Unpolished. Unposed. Unapologetic.

That hit me.

Because that might be the thing Scotland still has. Beneath all the cynicism. Beneath the poverty and division and alcoholism and self-loathing and political noise and shite weather and battered pride. We still have, somewhere in the national bone marrow, a deep suspicion of taking yourself too seriously.

In Scotland, if you get too grand, someone will bring you down. Not always kindly. Sometimes brutally. Sometimes unfairly. We have a national allergy to pretension.

We can be terrible for it. We can cut down flowers before they have even opened. We can mistake confidence for arrogance and ambition for betrayal.

But at its best, that instinct does something beautiful.

It keeps the room human.

It says: be brilliant, aye, but don’t be a bellend.

Be proud, but don’t float away from yourself.

Wear the kilt. Sing the song. Dance in the street. Hug a stranger. Cry at the anthem. But if you start acting like you are better than everybody else, someone called Tam from Cumbernauld will remind you that you once fell through a bus shelter after six pints and a fish supper.

That is not small.

That is culture.

I think I have been circling this thought for years without ever quite landing it.

That Scotland’s lack of tolerance for bullshit might not be a flaw. It might be the thing. The whole answer sitting there in plain sight, wearing the new salmon-pink away shirt and telling us when it smells shite.

Because there is a realism in Scotland. A hard, weather-beaten, pub-corner realism. A refusal to let language float too far away from life.

You can dress things up if you want. You can put theory on it. You can paint it in the colours of whatever political tribe is fashionable that week. But eventually some Scottish voice, probably from the back of the room, will say:

Did ye, aye?

And I love that.

Because the world has become addicted to bullshit in both directions. The woke and the anti-woke are all pricks the minute they believe they are superior.

That is the bit nobody wants to admit.

It is not always the position that makes you insufferable. It is the elevation. The moral height. The little private throne people build for themselves out of opinions, outrage, vocabulary, flags, causes, podcasts, newspapers and well-rehearsed contempt.

Scotland can smell that.

Maybe not always fairly. Maybe not always kindly. Sometimes our instinct to puncture egos catches innocent targets. But still, there is something in the Scottish psyche that twitches when someone starts lording it over others.

We do not like pomposity.

We do not like being spoken down to.

We do not like people who think the room exists to admire them.

And that, I think, is one of the main drivers behind Scotland’s apparent resentment towards England.

But I need to be precise there.

Not English people. Not ordinary English people. God no.

Ordinary English people are as funny, decent, skint, tired, generous, wounded and class-battered as anyone else on these islands. Some of the best folk you will ever meet are English. Some of the funniest. Some of the warmest. Some of the most beautifully unimpressed by their own ruling class.

No, what Scotland reacts to is the English media voice.

The institutional voice. The southern broadcasting voice. The Westminster voice. The voice that explains things to us. The voice that pats us on the head. The voice that treats Britain as England, England as London, and London as whichever five postcodes currently believe they are civilisation.

And in football, it is the pundits. The endless certainty. The assumption that everyone is watching through the same lens. The sense that the game belongs to them and the rest of us are merely guests at the table.

That voice makes Scotland twitch.

It always has.

And maybe we are like this because of that relationship. Because of the history. Because we have lived for centuries beside the machinery of empire, close enough to hear the accent of rule and recognise the sound of power congratulating itself.

We have had centuries of practice dealing with pomposity.

Condescending rule. Polite dismissal. Cultural superiority. The smirk behind the newsreader’s eyes. The joke about the accent. The assumption that intelligence sounds one way and comes from one place.

The idea that seriousness belongs to them and emotion belongs to us. That order belongs to them and chaos belongs to us. That they govern and we react.

So we learned what to do.

Laugh at it.

Tell it to fuck off.

Then carry on having a good time without asking permission.

Maybe the whole argument can be summed up by a traffic cone on the head of a statue.

Honestly, what is a statue if not self-importance cast in bronze?

Here stands some great man. Some noble figure. Some solemn historical big shot on a plinth, chin lifted, coat flowing, horse strutting, eyes fixed on destiny or whatever other nonsense sculptors do when they are trying to make a human being look less like a human being.

And then some Scottish boy, steaming or sober, inspired or bored, looks up at all that frozen grandeur and thinks:

Know what that needs?

A cone.

There it is. The entire Scottish philosophy.

Not destruction. Not hatred. Not revolution.

Just correction.

A wee orange hat placed on the head of greatness to remind everyone that greatness still has a head.

We do it to statues because statues ask for it. They sit there above us demanding reverence, and Scotland has never been comfortable being demanded into reverence.

Respect, maybe. Love, sometimes. Awe, on the right mountain at the right hour.

But reverence on command?

Away yi go.

The cone says: you may be remembered, mate, but you are not getting away from us.

And now, judging by the photographs, the Tartan Army have done it to every statue they could find in Boston as well. Which might be the most Scottish export imaginable.

Not whisky. Not tartan. Not poetry.

The spiritual technology of taking pomp down half an inch without pulling the whole thing over.

Because the traffic cone does not erase the statue. It does not smash it. It does not cancel it. It does not write a thesis about problematic bronze.

It simply makes it ridiculous.

It lets everybody laugh.

It puts the human back into the heroic.

That might be what Scotland does at its best. It does not always destroy power. It humiliates pomposity.

It says: stand there if you must, but we reserve the right to put a cone on yir heid.

The cone might be the deeper truth underneath the Tartan Army in Boston.

It is not just football fans on tour. Not just drink and songs and flags. It is a whole national immune system moving through a city. An immune system against false seriousness, hierarchy, self-importance and the dead-eyed modern terror of looking uncool.

The Scots arrive and the pompous poser spell breaks.

Suddenly everyone is allowed to be daft again.

That is not nothing.

That is freedom in its oldest, simplest form: the freedom to be ridiculous and still belong.

And I wonder if that is what people are responding to in Boston.

Not just the party. Not just the colour. Not just the spectacle. America knows spectacle. America invented half the machinery of spectacle.

What America maybe does not see enough of now is abandon without branding. Joy without strategy. Identity without weaponry.

Because that was the other thing in what the Boston woman said.

She talked about how Americans have been taking themselves too seriously. How everything is judged. Everything is watched. Everything is potentially for camera.

Every movement can become content. Every mistake can become a trial. Every opinion can become evidence. Every joke can become a crime scene.

So people perform.

They perform being happy. Perform being moral. Perform being desirable. Perform being clever. Perform being correct.

Perform being free while trapped inside the terror of being seen.

And then Scotland arrives.

Not perfect Scotland. Not romantic Scotland. Not the tourist-board version with mist and castles and fiddle music.

Real Scotland.

Loud Scotland. Daft Scotland. Big-hearted Scotland. Wind-up Scotland. Scotland with its arse hanging out its kilt and tears in its eyes during the nine thousandth rendition of Super John McGinn.

And the message is simple.

Be yourself.

Don’t be cruel.

Don’t be a dick.

Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Have a laugh.

That might sound small beside the great arguments of the age. Identity politics. Culture wars. Left and right. Us and them. Race, class, gender, nation, tribe, grievance, purity, language, offence, status.

The whole world now feels like it is divided into teams that hate each other but still use the same apps, buy the same coffee, repeat the same slogans and film themselves doing it. But from what I understand, this seems especially true in America over the last few years, where every part of life appears to have been pulled into some larger argument about who people are supposed to be.

But then the Tartan Army turn up, bam the place up and somehow boot the whole thing tae fuck.

Because here is one of the great contradictions of Scottish identity.

We are one of the most colourful and proud identities in the world. We wear ancient patterns. We sing old songs. We carry history like a limp and a weapon. We remember battles we lost seven hundred years ago. We can turn a minor sporting event into a referendum on the soul of the nation.

And yet, at our best, we do not require anyone else to become us.

That is the magic.

The Saltire comes out. The kilts come out. The songs come out. The whole mad theatre begins.

And somehow the invitation is not:

You must bow to this.

The invitation is:

Mon then. What are you waiting for? Get stuck in.

Bring your own daftness. Bring your own songs. Bring your own flag. Bring your own ridiculous dance. Bring your own grief and your own joy and your own people and stand beside us.

We will rip the piss out of you, aye, but we will rip the piss out of ourselves first.

That is the entry fee.

This is why the Scottish psyche, when it is healthy, might be one of the few real antidotes left to the world’s divisive madness.

Not because we are morally superior. Christ, no.

Spend ten minutes in any Scottish comments section and you will be cured of that fantasy. We are as petty, bitter, tribal, jealous, wounded and self-destructive as anybody. Sometimes more so. We have made an art form out of arguing with people we basically agree with.

But there is still something in us that knows the human being is ridiculous.

Really, really fucking ridiculous.

A culture that knows people are ridiculous has less need to make monsters out of them. It can laugh before it condemns. It can puncture ego before ego becomes ideology.

It can say, with love or violence depending on the hour:

Get o'er yirsel.

Maybe that is what America saw in Boston.

A people with a massive identity who were not demanding solemn recognition every five minutes.

A people proud enough to dress like a national flag and humble enough to look like absolute dafties doing it.

A people who could take over a city without making the city feel conquered.

A people who could be patriotic without seeming imperial.

A people who could be drunk without being hateful.

A people who could be sentimental and sarcastic in the same breath.

That, to me, is Scotland at its best.

The problem is we forget it at home.

We get dragged into the same global machinery as everyone else. The same miserable seriousness. The same online trials. The same factional language. The same addiction to being right. The same terror of being laughed at.

But our best selves are not online.

Our best selves are in a street somewhere, singing badly with strangers. At a wedding. At a funeral. At a football match. In a pub. In a kitchen. On a bus.

In the moment before someone takes themselves too seriously and the whole room smells blood.

That is not anti-intellectual. It is not anti-progress. It is not anti-anything, really.

It is pro-human.

It says life is hard enough without turning yourself into a statement.

It says identity should be worn like a kilt, not carried like a blade.

It says pride should make room, not close ranks.

It says there is nothing shameful about joy and nothing weak about being daft.

It says the world is already full of pompous bastards, so for fuck sake do not become another one.

I watched those clips from Boston and felt something I have not felt much of lately when looking at the modern world.

Relief.

There they were.

Our mob.

The daft uncles of the earth. The mad cousins. The travelling choir of wounded optimists. The men and women who can turn any city into a wedding reception and any police officer into a background dancer if given enough time.

And beneath the carry-on there was a serious truth, though none of them would thank you for saying it like that.

Scotland’s gift to the world may not be whisky, tartan, football, poetry, engineering, philosophy or all the usual things we put in the brochure.

It might be this:

Don’t be a prick.

Be yourself.

Let other people be themselves.

And never, ever take yourself so seriously that you forget how to dance in the street with strangers.

RAY x

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