Celebratory meal

Finally drifted off to sleep in the early hours with the Scottish hurly burly done but the result still in the balance only to be woken up by a clap of thunder that would have woken Macbeth. I was too tired to go back down to see whether the battle had been lost or won but couldn’t help feeling that that thunderclap had been the sound of Scotland falling into the North Sea (or as my Scottish friends might say – England falling off into the Channel…)

Katy had become obsessed with the vote during the last couple of days – not least because they’d had an assembly about it at school and one of her favourite mentors was a huge ‘yes’ fan. She’d been doing a passable impression of Willie the Scottish groundskeeper from The Simpsons for days (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6vDzf-wSbk).

I was convinced the yeses would win and she was equally determined that the nos would get it so, I bet her a tin of shortbread the yeses would win. Nothing wrong with a spot of stereotyping if it brings biscuits into the house.

It took a while to fall asleep again after the thunder, lightening and torrential rain and when I did wake up a few hours later it was to the sound of Alex Salmond making a very gracious speech accepting the no vote but with just a twinge of ‘How about a best of three?’ for good measure.

Katy was up in a second, dressed in the kilt she’d laid out the night before, in time for breakfast. “Scotch eggs or porridge?” I asked her. She gave me a bit of an old-fashioned look.

But it will all be forgotten by this evening when we’ll be rocking up to school for the annual International Evening, which had had to be postponed from its traditional summer slot because of Ramadan, when the Islamic parents fasted from sun up till sundown – which in July was well past the evening’s finishing time of 7pm. It seemed a bit harsh putting on a celebration of international cuisine when some of the best cooks in the school wouldn’t have been able to taste it.

So tonight I will become a token Scot for the night and I’ll take along some of Anne’s traditional lemon cream decorated with raspberries (and some of Katy’s shortbread if she can spare it).

It’ll look great sitting there beside the Somali pasta dishes and pancakes, the Bengali chicken korma, the Punjabi pakora the Albanian honey and walnut cake and the Japanese sushi. But before we can eat we have to watch each class perform a song or a dance from a different country around the world. By the time they finished there’s never a dry eye in the house.