New Year celebrations in Scotland

Mid-December 2010, a well-heeled client sent me to cover a five-day event in Portugal, followed by several days in London “recceing” a major video shoot in Europe the following year.

The night before I was meant to return home, a blizzard whooshed down from the North Pole, bringing with it heavy snowfalls. It was three days till Christmas and all air traffic was suspended.

South African Airways told me the earliest I could get on a flight was towards the end of the first week of January.

The hotels were packed but, luckily, my client felt sorry for me and gave me a whopping daily allowance (paid in advance, in full).

Following Christmas on the Thames with an old army buddy, I headed north on the train to Scotland.

The weather was even more Baltic in Edinburgh when I disembarked the TransPennine Express at Haymarket, the first of two major stations in the Scottish capital.

Edinburgh Waverley is only 3km away and “getting off at Haymarket” is a local euphemism for coitus interruptus.

Festive cheer. Picture: Jim Freeman

I know Edinburgh well … quite apart from the fact that I was born and spent my first few years there. Outside of Cape Town and Windhoek, it is the capital city I have visited most in my life.

The city is known to residents as “the Athens of the north”, which, to the rest of the Scots, implies that its inhabitants are posh and snooty. They call it Auld Reekie (Old Smoky) and its people are disparagingly referred to as Edinbuggers. Perhaps the most telling insult is to describe the whole Edinburgh vibe as “all fur coat and nae knickers”.

Nonetheless, we enjoy our hoolies and stooshies as much as any Glaswegian or Aberdonian and I am personally acquainted with over 200 pubs (there are many, many more) in a city that has a population less than quarter of Cape Town’s.

Of all the wonderful experiences I’ve had in Scotland, there was one which in 2010 had still evaded me as an adult: New Year’s Eve.

Hogmanay, as the Scots call it, is the party to end all parties. Every other day of the year is merely a practice session for December 31. It is to the Scottish what Thanksgiving is to Americans; an event larger than Christmas.

Due to the geographical and religious accident of my birth, most of my family were staunch Church of Scotland adherents and lifelong Hearts of Midlothian football supporters. This meant my festivities would have been restricted to the somewhat dour pubs along the Dalry and Gorgie roads.

As a visitor, I had licence to party wherever I wanted and it had long been on my bucket list to do a pubcrawl on Leith Walk – the main road running through the heartland of the Catholic “enemy”.

Hogmanay torchlight procession through streets to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Edinburgh. Picture: iStock

I suspected, correctly, that Catholic guilt would transform into uninhibited joie de vivre when the time came for hoisting the elbow.

For all the differences in their alcoholic jollity (the C of S lads drink as if the Grim Reaper is seated on the next bar stool), Hogmanay traditions are the same whether you live east or west of Edinburgh Castle.

The best-known custom is that of “first-footing” – the quest to be the first person to cross a house’s threshold in the New Year – and bearing gifts to friends and family to ensure their good fortune during the next 12 months. The traditional greeting is “Lang may your lum reek!” … may your chimney always be smoking.

Coal and whisky used to be the gifts of choice but nowadays it’s a black bun or shortbread.

The Leith pub-crawl proceeds up the hill to where the Walk joins Princes Street, Edinburgh’s famous central thoroughfare.

Up to 80,000 revellers gather there, waiting for the clock to strike midnight and the world-famous fireworks display to begin. It’s one hell of a street party.

Do not hesitate to tell the Scots you’re South African because they think we hate the Sassenachs as much as they do.

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