From the comments on a previous post, we have this, from Michael Hare:
So what tartan do Episcopal clergy wear? Those of us who are of non-Highland connection would like to wear Clergy but the tartan makers refuse to make Clergy in kilt-weight.
Should we denounce them from the pulpit?!
Heavens, how should I know? How did I become the arbiter of clerical tartans? I’d suggest Michael that you direct the question to one of the many kilt emporia – they seem to be able to find family tartans for every American, Australian and Japanese who crosses their threshold. Surely they can rise to the challenge somehow.
This particular member of the Episcopal Clergy neither takes to the kilt nor wears trews. After all, is life not camp enough already?
I would direct this question to the Episcopal Bloggers of the North, but am struggling to think of whom they might be. Has the internet reached furth of Perth? It is odd really as every Tom, Dick and Agnes in the Diocese of Argyll has had a blog since the auld king sailed over the water, but bloggers from Aberdeen or Moray seem to be thin on the ground. Perhaps it is because of the new directive from the SNP “government” that all blogging from the far North has to be in the Gaelic and that from Aberdeen in the Doric.
Oh, how we struggle with questions of Scottish identity. I remember in the days when our sometime American mentor, Alice Mann was welcome in our company, she challenged the SEC about the Scottish/English question and told us we needed to get our heads in order and work out what we really thought about it. Hasn’t happened yet.
When I was sitting drinking tea in Edinburgh with Good Company on Wednesday afternoon, he innocently asked me, “So, how many of your bishops are Scots then?” He was thus subject to a diatribe about how the Welsh one was a Scot, the Scots one was English, the new one was a Scot and was certainly from Lincolnshire and the Irish one was, well, in Ireland. Before long, I was waxing lyrical about how Bonnie Prince Charlie’s mistress came from my own congregation, about the keeping of the memorial of Charles the Martyr and about the terror of the Penal Laws. After the first half an hour of this, Good Company smiled and said that he had never realised how complicated it all was. I stifled a cry of “And let me tell you what Glencoe was really about” and ordered another pot of tea.
English Breakfast, naturally.
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