‘From the perspective of Kirkwall, Edinburgh looks like a dangerously sybaritic Neapolitan city’ - Will Self traces the psychogeography of Scotland

WITH a panoramic view from grouse moors to shopping malls, Will Self deciphers the split personality within the Scottish landscape

Whatever anxieties I may feel, as an Englishman, about speaking to a Scots audience in the capital of Scotland about how they view their own geography are vitiated by my own vexed relationship with Caledonia – one that, I will argue, is itself a sort of figuration of the tendencies my psychogeographic practice reveals in the collective Scots psyche.

It’s worth pausing here to consider perhaps one of the most significant scenes in recent cinema. I refer to the episode in Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, when, in search of a nature cure, the junky protagonists take off for a hike in the purlieu of Loch Lomond. Shivering in their cotton T-shirts, sodden in their PVC training shoes, the denizens of rundown Leith are painfully unsuited to this landscape of soaring, scree-sided beinns, snow-capped peaks and icy tarns; nonetheless the antihero, Renton’s, comment says it all: “Some hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We on the other hand are colonised by wankers.”

Ostensibly this is a remark on the impact of the Union, but given its geographical context it obviously plays upon the beauty of the vista as against the ugliness of Renton’s malaise – and by extension the great natural beauty of Scotland’s landscape as against the ugliness of its political and economic predicament in the 1980s and early 1990s.

I first came to know Scotland a little better than the average English wanker during this period. Or, rather, through spending time in the Scots penultima Thule, Orkney, I came to appreciate two key aspects of the relationship between the nation’s geography and its psyche. The first of these is diversity – and by this I mean not simply ethnic or topographical diversity, but both, combined. Once past the forbidding rampart of the 400ft tall red sandstone cliffs of Hoy, the Orkneys unroll before the visitor as an undulating landscape of rich mixed arable farmland mysteriously plonked down in the anfractuous waters of the North Atlantic and the North Sea.

The current population of Orkney is pretty much an admixture of lineal descendants of the inhabitants of Scara Brae (a fact established by researches conducted under the auspices of the Human Genome Project), and the more proximate descendants of the so-called “Good Lifers” (after the popular 1970s Surbiton-based sitcom of the same name), mostly English incomers to the islands during that period. The union of these peoples has proved remarkably successful, with the Orcadians effortlessly absorbing the Good Lifers, much as they absorbed the Norse before them. One thing is, however, for certain: neither moiety is much disposed to think of themselves as Scots. Indeed, a young Scotsman who lived on Rousay in the early 1990s (like quite a few others a DHSS émigré, who sought to live cheaply on benefits), and who insisted on wearing a kilt, was known derisively as “Jock the Frock”.