Will we no come back again?

'You'll just have to wait for your paper." I held my posture, and my tongue, as bidden. There would be no favours from this brisk lady in the village shop, least of all for a pushy American clad in black from head to toe. Each component part of every newspaper would need to be fully integrated into a neat pile on the long counter before she would let me make off with my Sunday Herald.

Outside, black boily clouds zeroed in to drop an early morning load over Lochgoilhead, scuttling all hopes of a dry and dignified retreat to our hotel, where my siblings were blithely plotting a day of rural pursuits. I would just have to wait.

As it was, we had waited for 22 years before gathering everyone for a family reunion in the mother country. Sure enough, the internet had helped matters, finally securing our plans at the point where they might have ganged agley. Perhaps this virtual communing had made a global family of us, and perhaps this was a new Scottish phenomenon.

Perhaps we were no longer simply a clamjamphrie of far-flung emigrants and emigres in the tearful tradition of the diaspora. Yet the economic forces that had scattered us to three corners of the earth seemed no less global to me than those which had steered wandering Scots, as if by remote control, in earlier centuries.

But, on reflection, it wasn't simply the cyberchat that had changed our ability to co-ordinate busy schedules. The winds of change within Scotland had also lent a hand, and their gravitational pull had tugged us in with an altered sense of purpose. Who knows, the new national mood might put paid to the misty sentimentalism of the expatriate visitor - or else make it even more insufferable.

The family crib lay to the east, in the carselands of the Forth. We had come of age in the cheerless glow of Alloa's industrial twilight just as the jobs were vacating in one long sucking sound. It is staggering to recite the number and variety of factories, all but vanished now, that flourished during our childhood in such a small town. A tourist might be drawn to visit some of these sites, but no industrial museums had been attempted. Like so many before and after, our good Scottish educations and professional training were mostly lost to the country that had raised us.

Also lost to us, or so it appeared, was the religion of self- denial on which we had been weaned. For we now lived in some of the world's more desirable comfort zones. Myself in the designer loft district of Manhattan's Tribeca, with neighbours like Robert de Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Letterman and the late JFK Jr; Derek in North Carolina's Chapel Hill ("the Southern part of heaven"); Ronald in the arty converted warehouses of San Francisco's SoMa; Patricia on Sydney's North Shore; and Martin, the brother who stayed, in the Range Rover haven of Auchterarder. Even our mother had moved to a cosy village in the Ochil foothills, (where a tourist trail has, in fact, been fashioned around the old mills). Sixteen all told, with the global spouses and weans, we had planned this gathering as a surprise for her - and hopefully for ourselves too.

The rain had set in for the morning, and the only shelter on offer would be a visit to the nearest grand country house, in this case the Duke of Argyll's Inveraray Castle. Yikes, not the Great Collaborator! Like any family with a whit of common sense, we knew to leave our politics at home, and, as the resident leftie, I was under particular pressure to zip it. I joined the party under protest.

Not to fear - the castle drew fire from mostly everyone for its selective and self-serving narrative about its owner and his ancestors. No mention of Glencoe, of course, nor of the long habit of collusion with the lion in the south. In our company there were only two SNP loyalists, but most were nationalist in spirit, and so the visit to the duke's quarters provided an occasion for us to bond as nationals as much as kinfolk.

A forced march through the village's souvenir shops, crammed with miniature novelties from the toy sweatshops of the developing world, added to the occasion. As the brother-in-law put it to me, while musing on a rack of See You Jimmy headgear: "Is this what the legacy of Ramsay, Ferguson and Hume boils down to?" There probably is a smart-alec connection to be made between the ideals of these 18th century philosophers and the wry civic sentiment that the Jimmy hat communicates, but that was not his point, and I merrily conceded it. His good- humoured complaint had been heard often enough in the decades since the Victorian tourist industry cranked out its first tartan geegaws. But the tone of rueful whimsy now seemed just a little more urgent in the year of the MSP.

The afternoon was spent clambering over soggy hills, and then we gathered in the hotel's dinner-and-dance room for the evening festivities. Cabaret fare was offered by a fiftysomething crooner with a twentysomething voice and a fickle tape machine. The star turn was a country and western belter who declared war on our eardrums and on Patsy Cline. In fact, country music was the staple diet of the evening. At family events like this it has become the global music of choice among white, English-speaking folks precisely because it is inter-generational and does not divide the teens from the elders. Our requests to the MC for a Scottish tune or two were roundly spurned (though the pedant might point out that country music owes a lot, historically, to the folk songs and ballads of Scots emigrants).

By ten o'clock the belter had driven myself and others outdoors to the merciless midge, and so we all retired to an upstairs lounge where no sooner had we sat down than the male elders began to serenade with traditional airs. Time to really get inter- generational.

At this point things were beginning to resemble an ex-pat variation on Ivor Cutler's Life In A Scotch Sitting Room, except that the teens were humming Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez hits under their breath. Yet the tunes kept coming, from all corners of the music map: Ally-Bally Bee, The Ball Of Kirriemuir, Wild Mountain Thyme, Fitba' Crazy, Flower Of Scotland. There were several songs which were popular during the folk revival of the early 1960s and so slightly before my time, and several more lyrics that I knew only in fragments. So my participation was fitful.

In fact, it appeared that I was the cut-off point. Anyone slightly younger either lacked the recall or the will to lend their voice - and the minors were just plain bemused. Here, perhaps, was the ancient oral form of the singalong dying out before our eyes - or was it simply the family patriarchs trying to assert their role of passing on tradition?

The jury was still out on that question, but as we dispersed the next morning I wondered how typically we had all behaved, and why we had turned up so many Scottish themes.

The goal of most family reunions, I suspect, is simply to survive them without having too many wounds to lick - or to rub with spittle as Ivor Cutler would put it. Families find a way to dodge their own secrets and complications by looking for a common bond in something else - in our case the songs, artifacts and history tales of a national culture most of us now revisit only once every year or so.

Yet it was difficult not to see how our reunionising had been shaped by the national rumblings. There was the usual crack about whether we would ever return to live here, but this time around the loose talk had some teeth to it and there was a new sense of obligation that I had not seen before. In my experience, Scots in America are not at all clannish - and, unlike Irish, Jewish, Jamaican and many other diaspora communities, do not have anything like the same supportive relationship, either economic or political, with a homeland. Perhaps that indifference is about to change.

Andrew Ross is the director of the American Studies programme at New York University. Born in Scotland and educated at Aberdeen University, Ross is one of America's foremost commentators on popular culture. His next book is The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Property Value In Disney's New Town, based on his year's residence in a ''Mickey Mouse house in Florida".

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