Wings Over Scotland

The YesScotland campaign website conducted an interesting thought experiment last week, turning the independence referendum question on its head by asking “If Scotland was still an independent nation, would you vote to join the Union?” It was an interesting and imaginative piece, penned by campaign head Blair Jenkins, and it got us pondering over which other aspects of the referendum might take on a different perspective if viewed a different way.

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We mean cyberBritNats, of course. Last night’s Olympic closing ceremony brought a charming collection of positive Unionists out of the woodwork with moving, heartfelt words of British unity such as these. We’re choking up a little even now as we type.

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We hope you’ll forgive us this last one, just for fun.

All the best odysseys begin in a hedge.

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In an earlier piece today, we referred to an error on the Herald’s website, where it was displaying a story about Madonna rather than a comment piece by Ian Smart. We note that the error appears to have now been fixed and the correct page is again displayed, in which Mr Smart offers his opinion on Scottish Labour’s choice of current leader.

Never having read a “Harry Potter” book or watched any of the films on account of being adults, we were unaware until today of the meaning of a word used in the column as a description of Ms Lamont, having simply assumed it to mean “madperson”. Having now looked it up, we thought it merited sharing:

“A Dementor is a Dark creature, considered one of the foulest to inhabit the world. Dementors feed off human happiness, and thus cause depression and despair to anyone near them. They can also consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims in a permanent vegetative state, and thus are often referred to as “soul-sucking fiends” and are known to leave a person as an “empty-shell.”

Mr Smart wishes to see such a creature as the First Minister of Scotland, and predicts such an event will take place should the electorate vote No in the 2014 independence referendum, which seems to us to be a highly compelling reason to vote Yes.

We know it’s the summer silly season for politics, but there’s a difference between “silly” and “stark slavering buggo”, and we suspect some in the “No” camp might have just jumped the shark. (We’d say they’d been out in the sun too long, but, y’know.)

We have some sympathy, because it can’t be easy being a British nationalist in Scotland at the moment. Despite massive blanket coverage of the Jubilee and the Olympics, and despite the Scottish Government having to wrestle with some difficult and controversial legislation on top of a sustained and co-ordinated smear campaign about Rupert Murdoch, the Unionists have made barely a dent in the popularity of either the SNP or the First Minister (who still remains the most trusted party leader anywhere in the UK), and scarcely any progress in terms of referendum polling either.

As we’ve previously noted, 2012 is likely to prove the high-water mark of “Britishness” for a generation, and if the FUDs can’t build a significant lead now, when every last star in the sky is aligned in their favour, then they’re going to be fighting an extremely difficult uphill battle over the next two-and-a-bit years, and particularly in 2014 when Scottishness will be very much to the fore thanks to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles and of course Scotland’s inevitable qualification for, and victory in, the World Cup in Brazil.

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We’ve been feeling a little hurt this week, readers. Judging by the number of bloggers and suchlike who’ve huffily blocked us on Twitter for no apparent reason, or just said nasty and untruthful things about us, we were beginning to think we must be bad people. So we were relieved beyond measure when we asked website-of-the-moment Klouchebag (which marks users on four undesirable traits, with low scores out of a maximum 100 being good) to analyse our tweet history and got this reassuring result:

Just for a bit of lightweight Friday-night fun, then, we decided to run a random selection of our follow list through the machine too, along with a small scattering of wildcards and some of the delicate wee flowers we’re clearly still too awful for, and see what an impartial automated observer made of it all.

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