Scotland: Gingers by Kieran Dodds

Phil Ford, 33, English teacher, from Glasgow.

'From 0 to 10 years (at primary school) there are only advantages. Its unique, on holiday in Spain old women approach you and touch your head. From 10 to 20 it is a difficult decade. Twenty years plus, we are easy to reach at for insults. We are a minority group, unprotected by legislation. People think they can rip into us without legal intervention.'

'My only criteria for getting married was they should not be ginger...
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Phil Ford, 33, English teacher, from Glasgow.

'From 0 to 10 years (at primary school) there are only advantages. Its unique, on holiday in Spain old women approach you and touch your head. From 10 to 20 it is a difficult decade. Twenty years plus, we are easy to reach at for insults. We are a minority group, unprotected by legislation. People think they can rip into us without legal intervention.'

'My only criteria for getting married was they should not be ginger for the sake of my future gene pool. Act of genetic suicide! A limiting of the gene pool once we got past the fact we were both ginger. It's quite unusual.'

'Before Maisie was born we understood we would definitely have ginger children somewhere on the ginger spectrum, anywhere on it but somewhere. Immediately after she was born it was clear she was ginger, you get to a point and you think lets work this as a strength. Like I tell the kids at school we are like the Weasley's in Harry Potter. I think it’s a great opener for meeting people. if we go for a walk in the local park she will be followed by 25 foreign students like she was a celebrity and a group of paparazzi following her.'

'I thought marrying another ginger was like flavouring with too much salt, you need a bit of light and shade. It's quite unusual. Does that sound terribly superficial? I never considered marrying a ginger as an option. You accumulate an idea of the sort of person you are going to marry but that was a paradigm shift. I never thought that could be possible. It is possible.'
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