Weathered or Modern

(Fairly) bright and early on Saturday morning I was at the door of Geoffrey (Tailor)’s kilt making premises on the High Street in Edinburgh, where I met Howie, the kilt designer in chief, and also head of 21st Century Kilts. Howie is a bit of a legend, who is in his ninth year of wearing only the kilt (he says he couldn't imagine going back to trousers). In between his directing all manner of operations around the shop we talked through various weights of fabrics and cuts of kilts until we settled on something that should prevent me dying of heat exhaustion.

Once the type of fabric had been picked out, the next dilemma was which tartan to choose. Each clan has a number of tartans, each specific one being a variation on a theme, with each variation going by a different name, for example Ancient, Modern or Hunting.

The Nelsons are proud to form part of Clan Gunn, and in the lightweight fabric we had settled on there was a choice of Ancient Gunn, Modern Gunn and Weathered Gunn.

The Ancient Gunn, apart from not being entirely to my taste, has rather a lot of pale blue going on which probably wouldn’t last so well across 800 dusty miles, so that was ruled out from the off, leaving Modern and Weathered to fight it out.

Modern is all dark blues and greens...

On the other hand Weathered, as it sounds, is muted and subtler...

According to Howie he could see the Weathered Gunn fitting in perfectly with the arid Spanish landscape, and not only that, but coupled with rugged hiking gear he thinks I’ll become a sort of kilted Indiana Jones figure, boldly striding across Spain. In the face of these arguments obviously I ended up going with the the Weathered.

Now, where did I put my whip…