At the risk of overgeneralizing, it seems to be a thing in Scotland to start the day with a good stiff drink. I remember taking the train from Lenzie into Edinburgh for breakfast at a gloriously refurbished bank-turned-restaurant and watching a man seated alone at the next table. Dressed in a business suit, he ate a traditional bangers and mash breakfast but, instead of coffee and orange juice, he washed it down with a couple pints. With the last gulp, he stood and ambled off to work. In Toronto, thanks to our straight-laced prohibitionist heritage, such a breakfast would be impossible. Liquor licensing laws prohibit serving alcoholic beverages until 11:00 am.
I made the photo here as I was walking one morning down Sauchiehall Street. Judging by this man’s speech and by his difficulty sitting upright, this was not his first drink of the day. Interestingly, his was not the stereotypically slurred speech of a town drunk; it was the trained speech of a Shakespearean actor reciting a soliloquy. He carried three books in his pocket. The outermost was that most Scottish of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth.
