Teetering to tartan tearfulness

FAINTHEART: An Englishman Ventures North of the Border by Charles Jennings (Abacus, 10.99)

CHARLES Jennings seems to have spent the whole of a trip to Scotland in 1999 on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In Leith, he was "lost, dislocated, completely adrift from the real world"; in Aberdeen, he experienced "a low-key rage of frustration and thwartedness" and in Taymouth Castle he had to restrain himself from "sprinting off in to the distance yet again, trying to escape the fear".

All the hotels he stayed in were nightmarishly cold, bleak and underlit, the streetscapes were "doom-laden" and the pubs full of psychotic drunks about to mash him simply for being a southern softy.

Why did he endure all this discomfort?

Why go to both Loch Ness visitor centres and a family variety show called Not Another Very Special Hog-manay?

Because (as Jennings is happy to admit) he wanted something to illustrate his ideas about Anglo-Scottish relations,

some evidence that the auld enmity is alive and well.

The book's charm is that it doesn't take its own brief very seriously.

Jennings's argument, like his route, is "super-erratic", starting in Edinburgh, ending in Glasgow, taking in the Highlands, Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee and a bit of the Borders, but stopping short of the Outer Hebrides, which "are just too far north".

A lot of his adventures are complete non-events, and he affects to be lost the whole time: "I realised with horror at this point that I'd driven so far I was practically in Perth. How the hell had I managed that?"

Sport-punctuation. It was just there.

It had a life of its own."

But a lot of the time, Jennings is teetering on the edge of a big tartan tearfulness, and knows it. Moved (who wouldn't be?) by Alex Salmond's solo on an SNP album called A New Sang: 12 Songs of Scottish Independence (also featuring Winifred Ewing, MSP and the party's financial spokesman), he has to retreat in to ratiocination: "Some minor chords, a morose Scots voice, a couple of dialect words (hame, mither, Jeanie), an atmosphere of homesickness and Sehnsucht.

Just put it together in a bowl and stir, and voila! you have instant Caledonia."

But for all that, Jennings is overcome by the sight of sunlight on the Highland heather, believes that the Scottish parliament "implies bigger and better things" and found the death of Donald Dewar "completely shocking".

So he's just a sentimental Sassenach, after all.

ing the persona of the idiotic Englishman, Jennings hangs around Leith and Maryhill and searches out famed items of Scots cuisine, such as the deep-fried Mars bar.

The fact that he's not beaten up anywhere and can't find the Mars bar (available in Oxford and Penzance) ought, perhaps, to kill off the Scots stereotypes he is hoping to embrace but, no, there's too much humour to extract from the food, the weather, the naffness of every town but Glasgow.

On he goes, regardless.

His masochistic travel notes are camply amusing, but his digressions are much better. He lays in to Bonnie Prince Charlie in a satisfyingly vindictive spirit and introduces the non-Scots world to the genius of a comic called Rikki Fulton. He redeems the "Glasgow Voice" by pointing out how musical its use of "fuck" is as a rhythmical unit: "It wasn't there for emphasis.

It wasn't even there for

Copyright 2001
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