Let’s talk about where I’m from.
My parents are Scousers but I was brought up in rural Scotland.
The film I most identify where I’m from with is The Decoy Bride. A film set in the Outer Hebrides in which David Tennant tries to keep his accent sounding English and the plight of the rural Scottish village has a starring role.
Granted I’m from the south of Scotland and we have regular visitors who marvel at our art, quaint buildings and mad locals, but we’re fairly normal as small Scottish towns go.
Which means we’re bloody mental.
The local currency is gossip, our typical traffic jam is five cars stuck behind a tractor and our nearest cinema is around an hour away.
You don’t have to be in the middle of the ocean to be rural.
It’s a beautiful place with rolling hills and glorious seascapes and not one, not two, but six local pubs in a place with one main road running through it.
The rural Scottish pub is a strange creature. One place is crumbling to the ground, has a jukebox and sells toffee vodka shots at a knockdown price, recently for sale and impossible to sell. Another is a rather more classy place where farmers and the like go for a pint and to catch up on all the gossip, which there is a fantastic amount of.
Affairs, pregnancies, animals escaping from the local wildlife park. Strangely not many murders, but we did have an eerie lighthouse murder about 20 years ago which is horror film worthy at best and just downright spooky at worst.
But you’ll hardly find a place with prettier scenery, better museums and galleries, more weird or wonderful people or more Americans pretending they’re from here.
If you feel like a trip punctuated by great pub food, historic ruins and dramatic antics then pay us a visit, although you’d be lucky to survive.
If you don’t drown in the harbour or a loch, or get caught up in a scandal or get alcohol poisoning/ clogged arteries from our local food specialties then you should have a fabulous trip.
God speed my friends. Bring a stomach pump.
How to Mess Up Your Twenties 
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