IF - and, because we are Scots, it is a huge if, Scotland voters YES on 18 September, we can rise and be a nation again. One positive about this might, and hopefully will be, that we finally have a grown-up relationship with our English neighbours.
Having lived and worked down there, I know, on a personal level, they are no different from us. I met a lot of lovely English people and made firm friends during my spell in the south. I also met one or two right nyaffs whom I would not give house room - but, there are Scots up here of whom I could say the same.
Truly, we are all "Jock Tamson's bairns", even if big Jock might better have kept it zipped away some nights!
However, there is an element within the English-based media whom I cannot wait to see the back of - particularly at World Cup time. The on-going football fiesta in Brazil is the 17th World Cup which has had a British dimension. Sadly, after 16 previous goes, neither ITV, who broadcast last night's England v Uruguay matcvh, nor the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation, has ever got round the relatively simple task of differentiating between Britain and England.
Their assumption is that everyone in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is supporting England; they see themselves as official cheerleaders for Engerlund, Engerlund, Engerlund, as they fervently wish for a repeat of the glorious deeds of 1966 and all that.
I suppose I am typical of most Scottish football fans: I wish no ill-will on England. I'd rather we were there too, but, in the absence of Scotland, England would appear to be the team we ought to support.
I want England to do well, but, after many years of exposure to the English media, and again with a nod to 1966 and all that - I don't want them to do too-well. Because, there is no happy medium with the English media.
It must be terrible being an English footballer, going from a world-beater to a turnip on the basis of one bad result; hyped to the heavens pre-match, then name-called on the basis on#f one error, made in the heat of a game; stumbling from "A Golden Generation" to dross with a few touches on a sub-editor's computer keyboard.
In the continuing absence of a Scottish team with global ambitions, relishing the English angst which follows another stumble out of the World Cup before the sharp end is as good as it gets for we Scottish football fans. And, in case any English readers have stumbled on this, don't think it is a one-way street - I had to suffer a lot of verbal stings on the back of our failure in 1978, when I was living and working in England.
The England squad in Brazil is a middling international side, but, it is a work in progress. That progress will be faltering and doomed to failure, however, for as long as the men at the top in the English Premiership clubs prefer to recruit and use foreign players and coaches and ignore bringing through English boys, whom they grtow into English men.
ITV and BBC, and Sky and BT Sport all hype-up the English Premiership as "The Greatest League In The World", forgetting, its "greatness" is under-pinned by big-money clubs trawling the globe for mainly foreign imports, a rocess which leaves poor Roy Hodgson as the latest England manager forced to cobble together, with the minimum of assistance from the clubs, an England team of players who are, by and large, not the main men with their clubs.
The best hope for a second World Cup win for England lies in a melt-down of the English Premiership, the loss of most of its money and a return to the top-flight in that country being a league in which the best players are British - mainly English. Such a calamity would also benefit Scotland.
Mind you, the fact that we are now, after the excesses of the Souness Revolution, reverting to being a Scottish League, in which the majority of the players are Scottish, has helped us regain some international credibility - there is a lesson there for the English, although I doubt if they will take it.
FINALLY, my mischievious side got a huge lift from the TV panning shot around the crowd in the aftermath of the Uruguayan winner.
There, slap bang in the middle of a block of delirious Uruguayans was a solitary Tartan Army foot soldier, resplendent in our new, quite terrible, "away" strip, waving a saltire and going just as berserk as the South Americans all round him.
Gaun yersel pal - we know where you are coming from. Clearly not a Better Together supporter I feel.
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