Och aye

Today, after two months, MY KILT CAME IN!!!  (This is remarkably quick; most makers take four.)  I’ve been having the baleboosteh hold back some of each Færie paycheck since February, so it and its belt are paid for; I’ll have to have more taken out to re-equip myself with the accessories I no longer have:  hose and flash, sgian dubh, a longer chain for my sporran, bonnet, and cap badge.  Fortunately, I’m allowed to use from our rental stock as “loaners” when I go to the Mensa Annual Gathering in New Orleans next week.  Provided I remember to put on enough talc to keep from chafing, it should do nicely for the formal events.

Of course, the first part of buying a kilt is picking the tartan  Since I have Scottish ancestors all over the place, I could just about take my pick of clans whose tartans I have at least some claim to wear:  MacArthur, MacDowell, Campbell, MacBee, MacPherson, and Tate.  (OK, Tate is actually a Lalans name and they wear the Edinburgh district tartan instead of a clan tartan.)  In the end, I went for MacPherson, since that’s about the closest male ancestor I have who could claim to wear a tartan.  I could have chosen Campbell of Argyll as my father did, but wearing a Campbell tartan is, in many places, the equivalent of walking into a bar and yelling, “I CAN LICK ANY !@#&*@%@!!! IN THIS !%*&!@#!&!!! PLACE!!“  Particularly if there are any members of Clan Donald in the room.  It’s remarkable how people get so upset over little things like that misunderstanding at Glencoe.  So it seemed to me that given the choice between a Campbell ancestor and a MacPherson ancestor of equally close relation, MacPherson was the better choice.  Once that was done, we got down to arguing about exactly which tartan to use.

Like most clans, Clan MacPherson has several “setts,” or patterns, from which to choose.  There’s MacPherson Modern (six of them), MacPherson Muted (two or three), MacPherson of Cluny (another two), MacPherson Hunting (three of them), and no fewer than seven Dress MacPhersons, depending on who you order the cloth from.  And of course there’s no consistency of color at all.  One maker’s MacPherson Modern will have a very orangey, tomato-ish red in it, another’s will have a more Turkey-like red.  This link takes you to a swatch that’s about the best match I can find for the sett I finally chose.  It’s called a “Muted” MacPherson, and compared to other MacPhersons (a less-extreme example is here), it’s indeed muted.  Many MacPherson Modern tartans are a long orange honk in the middle of your day, something only a die-hard Texas Ex could love (and that I’m not!).

One thing that is gonna have to get rectified is that it appears I got measured on a “fat pants” day, when I was retaining water and puffed up as a result, ’cos the kilt’s distinctly loose on me, and the waistband bunches a bit underneath the belt.  Fortunately, L is competent to see about that once we’re back from New Orleans.

The Young Pretender counted to two in the dynastic battery.  Fnord.