IS home where your heart is or your hat hangs?
Whichever, it's certainly not about common sense. Tony Winters, the Glaswegian who made all right-thinking fellow Glaswegians blush tomato with his claim that charging for red sauce in Edinburgh chip shops is racist, has given me an identity crisis.
Mr Winters claims allegiance to Glasgow and points to the east/west divide of having tomato or brown sauce on your chips as a vital tenet of belonging to either city.
But he's lived in Edinburgh for 18 years. That's enough time to acclimatise. Maybe that's why he seems to be displaying the cliched Edinburgh attribute of penny-pinching while claiming racism against his Glasgow roots. That's the thing, isn't it? It seems impossible not to be affected by anywhere you live. Good or bad, your surroundings permeate.
Deborah Orr, the Lanarkshire-born, London-based journalist, took a cheeky swipe at my own home town while commenting on Mr Winter's Saucegate. She suggested that residents of Edinburgh in pursuit of any sauce at all should be "punished with swift deportation to Coatbridge".
My hackles bristled. Poor old Coatbridge. It's the go-to hell hole for those in need of a quick pun.
It started with George Orwell using a photo of Coatbridge in The Road to Wigan Pier, to illustrate the section about the bleak lives of te working classes.
The instinct is to defend the town. "It's not that bad! It's come on leaps and bounds. It's um... it's got Summerlee and the Time Capsule, pictured, and, er, my mum's house."
There's the nub of it. It's got my mum's house. I won a Blue Peter badge for writing about Summerlee and I was the first kid in the Time Capsule on its opening in the 1990s. There is the church my cousin married in, over there the site of the steelworks that employed my grandpa.
There's my primary school and my gran's house, Snuggles the hamster buried in the yard.
These are not qualities with which one can widly promote a town but don't you always have affection for the place that made you, no matter the place?
I thought I was terribly proud of Coatbridge but analysis reveals I'm just overly sentimental.
Still, there is always one comfort in being from Coatbridge: you are not from Airdrie.
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