Lost Worlds
Did you wonder where you’d gone? Scotland is here given the Atlantis treatment by Midshipman and human-labrador Ben Fogle.
Despite being one of the signatories pleading Scotland to ‘stay‘ in 2014* (along with luminaries such as Kirstie Allsop, John Barrowman, Dickie Bird, Gyles Brandreth, Ronnie Corbett, Tracey Emin, Toms Holland and Hollander, Sir Bruce Forsyth, Rod Liddle, Kirsty and Gabby Logan, Andy McNab (you know the SAS guy), Al Murray, Sir Cliff Richard, ‘Sting’ and Alan Titchmarsh) Fogle’s career has come back again and again to the Lost World.
Ben’s career was of course launched on Taransay in Castaway in 2000, but as well as stints co-presenting Crufts, Country Tracks and Prince William’s Africa, he has ventured back to Scotchland in Coastal Walks with My Dog and ‘Scotland’s Sacred Islands with Ben Fogle’ (2021).
Now, having visited Lost Worlds such as ‘Detroit’ and ‘Chernobyl’, the intrepid Fogel tackles ‘Scotland’. In a previous episode Fogel set out to explore what caused the communities of Detroit to fall apart. This week he will take the same form of radical othering to the Lost World north of Carlisle.
Maybe there’s a connection between 2014 and today? Maybe Ben was faced with such an existential threat in thinking about Scotland being ‘Lost’ that it caused some irrevocable crisis, like a constitutional Bermuda Triangle or a political Brigadoon?
Answers to explain the confusion on a postcard … if you can find us …
* “The decision on whether to leave our shared country is, of course, absolutely yours alone. Nevertheless, that decision will have a huge effect on all of us in the rest of the United Kingdom. We want to let you know how very much we value our bonds of citizenship with you, and to express our hope that you will vote to renew them. What unites us is much greater than what divides us. Let’s stay together.”
Well…..here’s what really matters for the signaTORIES…..and some were actual Tories too…in that statement that they signed in 2014….and it’s this…
” will have a huge effect on all of us in the rest of the United Kingdom”…..yes indeed it would and that is the part that really concerned some of them…..no more UK and thus also no more ‘Great’ Britain…..and I assume this was a great focus also for whoever it was who composed that statement for others to sign…..indeed as a statement it was more about THEM than us was it not….as per.
But also what was being referred to when noted that “What unites us is much greater than what divides us”……so what does unite us given we are very much separate nations via many aspects ……as in one example being whom we choose to elect, as in a different political party, as our preferred party….England elects Tories via a majority of WM seats and we in Scotland do not and that certainly “divides us” ….and the fact that many in Scotland choose to elect a pro independence party also “divides us” or rather , in their opinion , fails to “unite us” with their opinions and their preferred choice(s) of political party(s).
I think whoever composed this for the signatories to sign was trying the same tactic as a certain author who also posted a little ditty in 2014 to appeal to those with a more ….gullible and sentimental side…..because that too as a statement has fallen by the wayside and the person who composed it seems to now be acting as if it’s composition had never been written ……thus like most things directed at us in 2014 we are left with broken promises and pledges (and ditties) that are as empty and meaningless now , as statements, as they were back then.
I dread to think what new compositions they will compose to try to appeal to us to stay within their UK come the next Independence Referendum ……though they must now see they are limited in how they to choose to appeal to us to try to make us consider staying in their UK for a SECOND time……given what we have had to endure within their UK since 2014 …..but I am sure they will indeed repeat much of the same drivel as before …..after all they can hardly say that since 2014 ” never have we, in Scotland, had it so good BECAUSE we chose to stay in their UK”……but I suspect some may try…..LOL
Yep, the open letter was wrong-headed. All that unites our separate nations is a treaty, by which we undertook to create a supranational union that would solve the Scottish kingdom’s economic problems by giving Scottish investors free-trade access to English markets and would solve the English kingdom’s security problems by ensuring the Hanovarian succession on both sides of the border between the two kingdoms, and the subsequent global empire of the resultant bi-national state.
We don’t have a shared national identity that would unite us. But, then again, neither Scotland nor England any longer has a single national identity by which the two imagined communities can be sharply contrasted either. Both traditional identities have dissolved into a shared cosmopolitanism, which has rendered anachronistic and regressive the ethnic nationalisms by which ‘the Scots’ and ‘the English’ once distinguished themselves. Both Scotland and England are now more similar, as nations of many diverse cultures, than they have ever been before. About the only thing that the nationals of each of the two nations share is their shared citizenship, which is precisely all that the supranational ‘British’ do. We’re nowadays ‘Dumgallovidian’ (or whatever) only insofar as we’re subject to the jurisdiction of our local government, ‘Scottish’ only insofar as we’re subject to the jurisdiction of the Scottish government, ‘British’ only insofar as we’re subject to the jurisdiction of the UK government and (until recently) ‘European’ only insofar as we were subject to the jurisdiction of the EU. (Pity the ‘English’, who have no civic institution around which they might unify in their ethnic diversity as an imagined community).
I suspect that the arguments that UK Remainers will use in the run up to any future Scexit referendum will be broadly similar to those they employed in the run up to the 2014 referendum: that people in Scotland will generally be worse off if Scotland leaves the UK than if it remains in the UK. And I suspect that the Scexiteers will again argue the contrary.
And those of us who have no tribal loyalties to one side or the other will again test the soundness of their respective arguments for their soundness with our little critical hammers and vote accordingly.
Why is Sting the only one whose stage name is in quotes?
I’m glad you raise this very important question
The Scottish education system, where punctuation is’nt ‘important…’
That should be ‘isn’t’, surely.
230925: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony
Ah, so it was a ‘deliberate’ mistake. Then shouldn’t your ‘is’nt’ have been punctuated with quotation marks, to gesture to the reader that what they enclose is ironic or mocking and not an error that the writer themselves would typically make?
Who, exactly, are these worlds “lost” to?
Not the people who live in them. Nor to people living elsewhere who can easily buy property in them at a fraction of the value of the property they sell.
To whom have they become “lost”?
The islands that the episode visited – Stroma, Swona, and St Kilda – had been lost to the communities that once inhabited them. That was the whole concept of the series: to travel to neighbourhoods that have been abandoned (in Detroit, the Sonora Desert, Montserrat, Cyprus, Scotland, Ukraine) and discover the stories of their abandonment.
I can’t honestly see why anyone should feel aggrieved by the series – except, of course, that it was presented by a Yoon.
Ah, ok, I thought it was the whole of Scotland that had supposedly been “lost”!
That’ll teach me to read stuff on holiday with my phone with dodgy reception.
He seems alright, Fogle. I thought he was quite sensitive doing the religious island stuff.
I’m going back to watching the clouds…
I think that was the impression Mike intended to give.