Hosenselbst

Hosenselbstaendigkeifsgefuehl

As any salty Scotsman knows, people who sugar their oatmeal (i.e., the English) have no real appreciation of Bobbie Burns's "halesome parritch." But few Scots were prepared for the blow struck last week against oatmeal. Not only did London ration Scottish oatmeal, but it announced the order in a list concerning sago, tapioca and other plebeian foodstuffs.

"If we are to play about with the staple food of Scotland," cried Tory M.P. Lord William Montague-Douglas-Scott, "we believe it should be done at least by a separate order, and not classified in the same sentence as dehydrated potato flour." Some M.P.s laughed, and Lord William rounded on them. "I see nothing to laugh about," he cried. "It is an insult to one of the finest foods produced in the northern hemisphere."

"The people," said Niall McPherson of Dumfries, "are accustomed to their oatmeal, and they must have it." But the pleas were in vain. Like a stiftnecked English nanny who knows what's best, the Parliament sustained the oatmeal ration.

There were other questions, beyond oatmeal, to bother the Scottish M.P.s last week. "Is the President of the Board of Trade aware," asked Hector Hughes, "that in the city of Aberdeen there is a shortage of outsize nether garments, for men and boys over six feet in height?"

"What's the difference between nether garments and trousers in Scotland?" asked schoolmasterish Henry Strauss, Tory member for Combined English Universities. "Kilts!" shouted a Socialist backbencher, and the Sassenachs laughed again. But it was the Scots who had the last laugh after all, for the English, who had no kilts to fall back on, were themselves having trouser trouble.

"It is widely known," wrote Historian Arthur Bryant in the letters column of the Times, "that . . . man can go no faster than his own trousers. Four times in the past year of hope I have been forced to buy a new pair of braces, and after each occasion the braces have broken irretrievably within three months. I have tried them plastic and I have tried them un-plastic. Can Sir Stafford Cripps, on whom all our hopes are now fixed, tell me what to do?"

Sir Stafford couldn't or didn't, but the Times had a word to offer. "Peace of mind," it said, "is virtually unattainable unless a man has what the psychologists call Hosenselbstaendigkeitsgefuehl, or trouser confidence. The four freedoms are a hollow mockery if our braces are going to be bursting all the time."

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