Scottish traffic cone welcomed in Boston after World Cup friendship

Fresh off its first-class flight from Glasgow, it received a reception befitting a visiting dignitary: a bagpiper in full regalia playing inside Boston Logan International Airport. Waiting to greet it were diplomats, the governor and Boston's mayor.

The guest of honour? An orange traffic cone.

The arrival of the "Boston Cone" marked the latest chapter in the city's unlikely love affair with Scotland's Tartan Army, whose habit of placing traffic cones atop statues during the World Cup turned the humble orange cone into one of the tournament's defining symbols.

"I have to admit, this is probably — yes, it is — my first official welcoming ceremony for a traffic cone," Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey said at the airport, before signing her name to it.

"But it's a pretty special one, isn't it? Because this cone tells the story of what happened this summer. What happened in Boston, what happened in Massachusetts."

"And special thanks to the Scots for drinking all the beer," she added to laughter. "I do promise you, when you return … we will never again run out of beer in Massachusetts."

During Scottish fans' World Cup visit, Boston bars struggled to keep up with the Tartan Army's thirst, with some running out of beer and scrambling for emergency deliveries.

The fans transformed parts of Boston into an unofficial outpost of Scotland, filling the downtown  area with bagpipes, songs and chants while bright orange traffic cones sprouted atop some of the city's most recognisable landmarks — from Samuel Adams outside Faneuil Hall to Red Auerbach outside TD Garden, former mayor Kevin White near Quincy Market and even the beloved Make Way for Ducklings statues in the Public Garden.

"There are still some traffic cones atop our most important statues," Boston Mayor Michelle Wu joked, recalling how Boston had "unofficially become New Scotland".

Ms Wu has already signed a letter of intent to make Boston and Glasgow "sister cities" after the way the city took to the Scottish fans.

The official commemorative cone, decorated with illustrations celebrating Boston and Scotland and the slogan "No Boston, No Party", will spend the next week visiting landmarks across Massachusetts to raise money for mental health charities before returning home to Scotland.

The tradition dates to Glasgow, where placing bright orange traffic cones atop public statues began as a late-night prank in the 1980s before evolving into an unofficial symbol of the country's irreverent humour.

The best-known example is the Duke of Wellington statue in the city centre, where the cone has become so iconic that repeated efforts to remove it have been met with public opposition.

"It's an in-joke that's gone too far, actually," one of the cone's Scottish escorts, Danny Campbell, said.

"But no, it isn't a joke. This is a metaphor for life."

Campbell said people could become consumed by "going to our jobs and cooking sausages and all the sort of serious stuff that adults have to do" and lose sight of what mattered.

"That's what our countrymen represented when they came here," he said, speaking of Scottish fans' stay in Boston.

"They left stomachs and cheeks sore from laughing, they cleaned up after themselves, they spread joy and these people came together with humour and they built relationships with each other."

"This is not just a silly cone," Campbell said. "It means love. It means love, and that is the whole point."

AP/ABC

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