Scottish Advertising Yet that little tidbit about Scottish advertising, and the Doc's response to it, tell us everything you need to know about current British attitudes towards their past. Far from being hidebound, or past obsessed, your intellectualoid Brit wishes nothing more than to forget the past. When the English Tourist Board changed its adverts after 9/11 from ones which attempted to get Americans to come to hip, with-it Cool Britannia to ones which showed Beefeaters, tea-time, and castles...Well! The BBC was horrified, let me tell you. People in Britain will say, "Oh, Cool Britannia was a slogan of Blair's, and it's gone." No it isn't. Blair never invents things for himself; he is a master of taking the nation's pulse, and Cool Britannia was a simple evocation of the unease which many of the educated elites feel towards their overwhelming historical past.

Why they can't feel like children on the shoulder's of giants, rather than children in danger of being squashed by giants size 48's, is a question to be answered at another time. But this Scottish advertising campaign is just another datapoint indicating that, alas, such is the case.