CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
Yesterday:
my gears slipped unless I was in 1st
my rear light refused to work at all
my lock died
i lost a gloveZ
Is there anything more that can go wrong on one day? Only that all of the above almost made me late to collect the wean from nursery!
Luckily, we have good bike shops. tbw fixed my gears, ebc found my glove and rang me to tell me, and tbc is dealing with my defective light.
Get you going native... wean ... ;)
Yep, days like that really suck the joy out of the ride don't they! Although it sounds like you've nw got lovely functioning gears; warm hands; and an excuse for new lightly bling. :)
Glad to hear things worked out. I've been rescued a few times by Leith Cycle Co. on London Road. Usually a chain issue: snapped one time, jammed the next. Very quick emergency repairs each time, lifesavers!
Ahem! On this coast it's a "bairn"!
"Ahem! On this coast it's a "bairn"!"
I always wondered that - it's bairn in Newcastle, so thought 'wean' was just the Scottish version of that. Then there are times I use words that I've clearly picked up from my parents. I've referred to Sparrows as Spuggies for as long as I can remember - thought it was an Aberdeenshire word till someone looked at me blankly, Google told me it's a Geordie word (hence the character in Byker, Byker, Byker Grove-ove-ove being called Spuggie).
Thread hijack. As you were.
"Ahem! On this coast it's a "bairn"!"
And Brown Sauce. (CCE OT non sequitur)
I always think that bairn sounds like something Scotty would say (me bairns, me bairns...) and a bit too tweely scottish for an incomer like me to try.
"And Brown Sauce"
I just didn't get the fascination with brown sauce at all when I first moved here ten years ago. I've been ground down though, and salt n' sass it is every time.
Why is bairn less twee than wain?
"This is an informal guide to the Scots tongue for the benefit of occasional visitors to Scotland or readers of Scottish literature. It makes no claims to be authoritative, complete or accurate."
'Wean' is Glaswegian - no twee city?
no tween city
(unless you count Falkirk)
And the nickname for Falkirk F.C. is the Bairns.
I always assumed bairn was east coast from childhood reading of the Broons dialect. Wean Broon just doesn't sound right.
It's bairn in the Borders too, and Cumbria. Which all sits nicely with my nascent Border republic campaign ("it's our peat/rain/sheep").
Would you annex Berwick?
North or 'pon-Tweed?
Given that this would encompass Northumberland, Cumbrian and the Scottish Borders, plus chunks of Dumfries & Galloway (mulling over whether we call it "the Debatablelands" for added romance and lawlessness), Berwick-upon-Tweed would be pretty central to operations, geographically ideal for tolling incomers in their iron horses...
@PS
Is this a personal plan??
Would make sense to have cross-border (existing) tourism promotions. Is there anything?
Could coalesce around Mountain Biking!
Probably a bit strong to call it a plan. ;) But something that's often lost in all the political debate on Indep******e is how similar (culturally, genetically, geographically) the areas on both sides of the Eng/Sco Border are.
There may be some joint tourism plans/promotions, but I'd be surprised given where responsibilities sit, which is a shame and possibly missing a trick. There is excellent cycling to be had on both sides of the border for both mountain biking and road biking.
"There is excellent cycling to be had on both sides of the border for both mountain biking and road biking"
Yes, I wasn't ignoring the road aspect - just that MTBing gets the promo - 7Stanes, Keilder etc.
Thater than black/white independence, with a delineated border and you're Scottish on one side and English on the other (which seems so old fashioned and open to causing unneccessary conflict), perhaps we need a "grey option", with a linear transition from being Scottish at one end, English at the other, and some sort of Anglo-borderer to varying degrees in the middle :)
Yep, 'wean' is Weegie-speak. Alas most popular Scottish television and radio programmes are produced in Glasgow, hence 'wean' and other soap dodging expressions (eg. 'gonnae naw dae that; cludgie; Senga; etc.') have escaped their geographic locale and polluted the consciousness of a broader swathe of Scots.
I blame it all on Rab C. Nesbitt. ;-)
"soap dodging"
Yeah I dodge River City.
"I blame it all on Rab C. Nesbitt"
Wot aboot Taggart?
Apart from odd things like Rebus or Looking After JoJo (pure brand new, eh?), there is a perceptible west coast bias in the geo-cultural locale of "Scottish" regional programming.
Well I believe about half the population of Scotland lives within the Greater Glasgow conurbation. So fair enough I guess.
As for Taggart, I don't think he would stoop so low as to use 'weans'. IIRC the dialogue was mainly Scottified English (for viewers 'doon Sooth') without Weegie patois woven in.
I can't distinguish accents sufficiently to work out which coast most people are from to be able to tell whence their vocabulary was collected. My parents-in-law say 'wean' (prn. "wayn") and they're lifelong Ayrish. My brother-in-law says 'bairn' and is approximately Invernesian, which I suppose is sort of technically east-coast even though it's not actually in the east in any meaningful sense of the word.
Berwick (tweed) apparently has a slightly ambiguous status. Since langshanks time is has been in England but not of England. It has been mentioned separately in declarations of war and peace. I seem to remember reading a few years ago that they were still at war with Russia because they were missed off the list after the Crimean war.
I don't think Putin is going to lose much sleep.
I lived in Cumbernauld for a few years and east coast accents seemed to start at Bonnybridge (as did flying saucer sightings). This may be slightly artificial bearing in mind the number of people who moved to the new town after the war. Cumbernauld's native population might have been swapped.
Edit
Checked on wiki. Apparently since 1746 anything which refers to England has been taken to include Berwick and Wales. They still leave the actually status of Berwick in question.
My Gran would say "wan o they" (she was of working class Glasgowegian extraction) but my great aunt would say "yin o they" being as she was of Penicuikian millworker heritage.
I would say that my Gran spoke English with Glaswegian dialect but great aunt (who was also 20 years older) something more approximating an anglicised form of Scots.
and reading Wikipedia in Scots is always quaintly amusing (or any other website, for that matter).
I haven't been to Berwick (on Tweed) for a while (apart from passing over on the train).
It seemed a bit 'time passed by' - but well worth visiting.
I was surprised that they hadn't made more of the waterside parts of its location.
Even more surprising (I suspect for most people) is that it's about 10 minutes quicker than going to Glasgow!
Can be cheaper too (if you book in advance).
I once asked a GNER man why they didn't promote it more. He seemed to think that the trains were usually full already.
When they are it must be with mega-good deals for Edinburgh-London. Often quite empty before/(after on way back) Newcastle.
Random web find - http://www.coast-and-castles.co.uk/berwick.html
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