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Here’s tae us: I’ll be raising a glass to my fairweather Scottish side

I cannot stand whisky — it tastes like molten dirt — but on Friday I’ll choke down a dram and hide the grimace. It’s bad for my act: Burns Night — tomorrow, duh — is the gala event of my career as a fairweather Scot. I will, as always, be putting on the performance of my life.

To explain — I was born in London and moved to Glasgow when I was five, went to school there, then returned to England for university. My nuclear family is half and half: my brother, father and I born in England, my mother and two sisters in Glasgow. So far, so British; mostly, I call myself a Londoner. Yet on occasion I flirt with identity tourism — or attention-seeking — by deploying tactical anecdotes to corroborate my Scottishness.

For example, I have told the story of how I did curling — once — so many times that colleagues must feel like they are living inside a tartan Groundhog Day. I will peacock wildly at your wedding ceilidh — we learned the dances in PE — and make like a tour guide every time someone mentions crossing the border.

Truly, I’ve been to Scotland three times in the past 12 years. On the other hand I sobbed — sadly, sincerely — when England were knocked out of the World Cup. I’d be extradited from Scotland for that — it was customary for classmates to invest in the football shirts of the team England were playing against, no matter the insignificance of the game.

Perhaps I’m simply confused. At school I was teased for sounding English; at home, my parents did merciless impressions of my “Scottish” accent — the one I used at school, apparently terribly — and hooted as I struggled to remember which way I was supposed to be pronouncing my vowels. Who do I think I am?

The ES tea slave’s days are numbered

Baristas might yet be replaced by robots — but what about interns? By the end of the month you’ll be able to order coffee to your desk via UberEats — in other words, deploy an app to do the work usually done by an earnest graduate.

I spent my first summer at this newspaper (and about two years afterwards) getting tea for superiors — memorising five orders and repeating them, sotto voce, as I hurried to the canteen. Despite being technically lowly, practically I was in the centre of the Venn — by which I mean everyone (mostly) knew my name.

Upwardly mobile interns — resist your digital usurpers.

Zuckerberg’s meal got Dorsey’s goat

Friends’ dinner parties can be an ordeal. A former housemate once alienated all our guests with her signature “pho” — or, lukewarm water and stringy vegetables, which, for the record, I quite enjoyed.

Jack Dorsey (Getty Images )
Jack Dorsey (Getty Images )

On another occasion I was invited over to a friend’s for home-made pasta — except it transpired it hadn’t been homemade yet. Four hours later, fingers spasming from rolling my own ravioli, we sat down to supper. It was 11pm on a Wednesday evening.

Celebs are just like us, it seems.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, has recalled dinner at Mark Zuckerberg’s in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“There was a year when [Zuckerberg] was only eating what he was killing,” Dorsey recalls. “He made goat for me for dinner. He kills it with a laser gun and then the knife.” A while later, Dorsey was presented with his main course. “It was cold. That was memorable. I don’t know if it went back in the oven. I just ate my salad.”

I’m so unprepared for thundersnow

“Thundersnow” sounds like a gameshow broadcast on one of those channels that you can only find on the television at a far-flung Holiday Inn. It is, in fact, real weather — and it’s coming for us.

After Tuesday evening, which, depending on whether you were in north or south London was either a picture-perfect blizzard or a sleeting downpour — the north-south divide persists — I am fearful.

Worse weather is promised, and I am unprepared: my favoured coat does not do up at the front. Not because its buttons have been mislaid but because it never had any in the beginning — what a fashion victim.