Yesterday I wore my bright green woollen coat to celebrate that spring was in the air. A man approached me: “I don’t like green.” I blinked a couple of times and then sighed.
Ever heard of Sectarianism? It is: “..bigotry, discrimination, intolerance or hatred arising from attaching importance to perceived differences between subdivisions within a group, such as between different denominations of a religion or the factions of a political movement.” In Glasgow, sectarianism is linked to football.
I was wearing green, so to the stranger I was obviously a Celtic supporter. He was evidently a Rangers supporter given his “I don’t like green” stance. He moved across the road to confront me head-on. I’m not proud of this, but I did a little girly giggle and put on my best Danish accent: “Oh, are you talking about the football stuff?” And after I had explained I was from Copenhagen, didn’t know anything about football, and he had repeated his “I don’t like GREEN” about a dozen times, the man told me that I was lucky I was such a nice girl .. otherwise he would have messed me up.
(and I once showed up wearing green nail varnish at work and was told that I better be wearing blue nail varnish the next day just to show my neutrality. It didn’t matter that green is one of my favourite colours and I don’t give a t*ss about club football. Honestly.)
This is the dark side of Glasgow life.
Oh the horror, it’s something I hate about the West Coast of Scotland. Normally sensible men ( usually men ) turn into raving bigots when there is football or religion involved. I was once stupid enough to go into a Southside bar with bright orange hair. Lucky for me it was a Protestant pub and I escaped with nothing more than a reminder about the date of the next Orange March!