It’s hard to hear:

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I am back in London from my weekend in Scotland. Somehow, every time I fly into Scotland it always seems like home. I have been in there so many times it feels like a friend. I have been there at least once a year since 1990, and several years, as many as five to six times.

Back in the old days before PADs and laptops I, like the whole world, kept my life straight with the help of a non-electronic handheld device called a diary. What you would do is write notes to your self, using a pen. You also had a section that carried all of your addresses and telephone numbers.

I know it’s hard for some of the younger of you to believe, but when someone said, “let me look that number up,” what they did was pick up a book and flip the pages until they got to the section that had the number. Then many times they would, through the use of a pen and the pad that came with the diary, transfir the number to a piece of paper.

Now you won’t believe this, but I swear, the person would then either tear out the information and give it to someone else who would write it in their diary, or place the note in their own pocket for future reference.

While I am sure that many of you think that I made all that up, what I hope you will believe is now many names and numbers that I had from Scotland. At one time I checked the list and found that over 35% of the names were from either Glasgow or Edinburgh, with a couple from St Andrews or Aberdeen for good luck. I have been lucky. I have made many friends over here and many of them are Scottish.

This trip was way too short, but I did have a chance to see several of my close pals. That was sweet, but that is not the story.

The people you meet in the streets or the bar, when hearing your American accent all want to talk with you. “Ach, you come from Atlanta, do you? Do you know Jimmy MacLean? He stays in Chicago.” I have had many conversations that started along those lines. The Scotts are well represented in the states, and they somehow think that you should know their relatives. You won’t meet anyone who doesn’t have a cousin, niece or brother leaving somewhere in the USA. I have said that you not only will meet some of the world’s friendliest people, but you will be in a country that still loves Americans.

This trip was the first time in 15 years of traveling to Scotland that I found myself defending us every time I turned around. Even from close pals. This was new and it was depressing.

Each conversion would start off with, “I’m not saying anything about the people, you understand, it’s that Bush!” That sentence would be followed by a string of words you can’t repeat on the family Internet. They would spend several minutes bashing Bush, then they add in Blair. They wouldn’t let go. In all the times that I’ve bashed Bush myself, I never came close to the kind of anger that I am picking up here.

What is worst is the refrain that the world thinks that America is a joke. Our policeman to the world routine has won us no friends. It’s not our boys that are dying it’s theirs and they have little time or sympathy or time for any explanation.

Years ago I got into a heated discussion at a cafe in Paris with several Frenchmen about America’s role in the world. That, for me, was sort of a fun argument. After all, they were French, who really cares or worries about what they think about anything. In fact, I remember even using that as part of my position. This time there was no humor in any position that I could take.

That they we trying to hold Blair’s feet to the fire did little to make me feel any better. They think he is a dummy and should be thrown out of office. They blame Bush for corrupting him, and then they blame him for following along. As one old gentlemen said, “It really was like a form of child abuse, isn’t it? The parent abuses his kid, and then his kid abuses his kid. That’s Bush and Blair, father and son. It’s no right.”

I didn’t face this kind of attack when I was in Oxford. The classes that I had were evenly split between Americans and the rest of the world, but this topic never came up. Looking back I would not have been surprised if this kind of issue had been debated, I could have handled it with grace and humor. But, there was nothing I could do up North. It was like I had let family down.

My trip out of Glasgow was the first time I didn’t look back. “That’s no the way I want it, lad, it’s no the way to be. It nea feels like home nae mere.”