The cause of it all: 70 per cent fat, 30 per cent salt, 100 per cent pure gastronomic bliss. The rowie, buttery or morning roll. Aitkens do them best.
The more alert of you will have noticed that a YouTube link to the documentary Bothy Life appeared on this blog a few days ago – and quickly disappeared again.
Frustrating, I know, especially for foreign readers who can’t get access to iPlayer, but I was asked to remove the link for copyright reasons and because it caused problems for Jack Archer, who made the film.
UK viewers can still, until 23 January at least, see it on iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06s1762 .
However Jack has been in touch with a wee consolation prize – the full version of the Aitken’s Morning Roll Song as he filmed it at Allt Sheicheachan during the making of Bothy Life. In the event, for reasons of length, abusive language and musical taste, it hit the cutting room floor (if there is such a place in these digital days), but Jack has resurrected it and YouTubed it for posterity.
For the uninitiated, and as explained at the start of this clip, the Aitken’s Morning Roll Song started out as a harmless wee song about… well, you can guess. To that our resident piper, Ian Shand, added an extra verse about Neil Findlay, who looks after Bob Scott’s Bothy.
Then it just exploded, more than doubling in size as Kenny Freeman wrote yet more verses, about a number of the regular characters in the Eastern Highlands branch of the MBA.
Jack filmed the first full performance, which is presented here, but the damned thing has just kept growing and the last performance I heard, at the Bob Scott’s Bothy Mark III 10th anniversary ceilidh, was over 10 minutes long! That’s long enough to put some prog rock epics to shame!
But enough preamble. On with the show…
