Aberdeen Quotations

The man from the islands, exiled in Aberdeen, had been
sent a bolt of homespun Harris tweed from his family. He
went to a tailor in Union Street and asked the assistant if
he could have a suit made. The tailor measured the tweed and told the man it was an inch or two short; he couldn’t make the suit. So the islander crossed the road to another tailor who agreed to take on the job. A month later, when the islander went to collect the suit he was surprised to see a small boy in the shop wearing a jacket made out of the family tweed. But his suit fitted perfectly and he was very pleased with it. As he was leaving the shop he asked the tailor how he had managed to cut the suit so well and have enough left over to make his son a jacket, yet the tailor across the road had declined the job on the grounds that the bolt was too short. The tailor laughed. ‘He has two sons,’ he said.

Gae name ilk toun, the four seas roun’,
There’s ane that bears the gree
For routh o’ mense an’ grip o’ sense,
It lies ‘tween Don and Dee.
The Braif Toun, the Aul’ Croun,
Time-battered though they be;
We’ll cowe the loon, wad pluck them doun,
An’ lan’ him on the lea, lads,
We’ll lan’ him on the lea.
William Geddes.

"Aberdeen impresses the stranger as a city of granite palaces, inhabited by people as definite as their building material."
H V Morton

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