Get the prequel

Lang Cat launched The Advice Gap 2023 last week. It’s one of their  biggest papers and is certainly worth douze of anyone’s pwan. 

Download it here

That’s enough ads-ed

Ok that’s the ad 0ver. But in the spirit of the Lang Cat, I thought some irreverent  and irrelevant detail on how the Lang Cat got it’s name would go down well, so I pinched this off the Lang Cat website

Whatever the talented Mr Barrett comes up with is likely to be every bit as entertaining.

HOW THE LANG CAT GOT ITS NAME

They say you should never meet your heroes, but when you get the chance to wander up to a slightly ginger Fifer in a red cap who wrote the song after which your company is named, you should probably do that.

And that’s what I did on Wednesday night of this week when I went to see James Yorkston playing at the Pleasance in Edinburgh with The Pictish Trail and Seamus Fogarty. It was a very low-key but very funny and musically ace night, drink was taken and it was all good.

At the interval I huckled James Yorkston and told him that I’d named my company after his song ‘A Lang Cat’ which is off a record called Lang Cat, Crooked Cat, Spider Cat. I think it’s out of print now but you can find out more about it here.

Anyway, when I was setting up the name kept popping into my head and wouldn’t go away, so I gave into it and that’s why the lang cat is called what it is. Also, it stops us sounding like a team name from the Apprentice or whatever.

James was a gentleman and managed to look not too crestfallen when I told him what business we were in. Sorry it’s not Fairtrade humanitarian stuff, James. He also told me the story behind the title of the record.

When he was in Spain one time, he saw three cats attacking a snake – one at the head, one at the tail and one at the middle. One was crooked – sort of bent out of shape I guess, one was (I dunno) spidery, and one was ‘lang’ which doesn’t just mean long but can mean skinny, like ‘a big long drink of water’.

There is no video of this Lang Cat song but cats do appear in the accompanying video of the Border Song – and they are Lang