About

A kist is the chest a Scottish family kept everything in. The deeds and the photographs, the letters nobody threw out, the medals. This is ours.

I am a Scot with a lot of opinions and no filter, and this is where I keep them. I write about Scotland: the history nobody teaches you, the words we have stopped using, the customs that quietly vanished, and the daft things that happen on a Tuesday. Some of it is funny. Some of it is not.

I also make quizzes, which is how this started. I got fed up of quiz questions with the wrong answers in them, so I started checking my own, and then writing my own, and now there are thousands of them. The free ones go up here. The big printable packs go in the shop.

The longer writing lives over at Scots Goblin on Substack. Same voice, more blether.

A wee bit about the word

Kist comes from the Old Norse kista, and the English word chest comes from the Old English cest. Same meaning, two languages, which is why we say kist and not chest. It is the same k as in kirk and church. Five hundred years of Norse and English arguing it out in the one word.

Written in Perthshire.