You can certainly buy Stollen at Christmas in Lidl and Aldi in the UK (Upminster now has an Aldi), but on the whole their ranges are British, as is shown by their Burns Night offerings (which I missed, of course). The following partial screenshot is taken from Google’s cache. It is no longer available at the Lidl UK site.
Click to enlarge, as usual (my thumbnails are rather small, but I haven’t yet investigated how to change their size in Serendipity).
Gareth McLean discusses the kilt in the Guardian today.
He feels that although it isn’t bad for twenty-five quid, it just doesn’t feel like the real thing (£375-odd):
To be fair, you can’t really tell with the kilt – at least, not from across the room. (The sporran, on the other hand, is cheap and nasty and no mistake.) It’s made with five yards of material – as opposed to the more usual eight – and though that material is machine-washable polyviscose, and not the finest wool woven lovingly on looms in bleakly beautiful corners of the Highlands and then turned into kilts by skilled craftsmen and women whose families have been kiltmakers for centuries, it’s certainly not as shoddy as I’d feared.
And yet, there’s still something wrong with this bargain-basement version of Scottish national dress. Never mind that the shirt has an unpleasant echo of early Spandau Ballet, the kilt simply doesn’t have the import it would if it cost what it should rather than what it can be made for in a cut-price factory somewhere.
(My heading is influenced by a statement by a German carers’ association today, complaining about the low wages of its members: McPflege darf nicht um sich greifen. Is Mc a new Denglish prefix in German?)
