“Take a drink!” The admonition in BBC Scotland’s comedy show, Chewin’ The Fat, is one we’ve all heard. It means: “Join in and get squiffy with us. For if you do not, forsooth, you will make us feel bad and, yea, we would fain banish you from our company.” I’ve updated the language for modern sensibilities, but you get the message. There’s pressure on citizens to drink, particularly in dysfunctional Scotia, last colony of a dead empire.

Possibly that’s why drink lies at the heart of Scottish Government policy.

It has been ever thus. Devolution has more than anything else been about booze, fags and food.

The flagship policies of every administration have focused on these three evils and while, at the time of going to press, citizens are still allowed food, there’s pressure on them to eat fruit in particular.

“Take a banana!” The admonition rings out from high and, dutifully, we ignore it, preferring still the tangy squishiness of the oven chip or the slithering grey interior of a traditional Scotch pie.

Defence, foreign affairs, fruit. These are now major political issues and, while Scotia as currently constituted is only allowed a say on the last named, in future we may also control the first two, though I suspect fruit will remain the main priority.

I’ve wandered seamlessly from alcohol via warfare to fruit, and would like to return to the main point of this exegesis: the drink. Yes, indeed, ladies and men, not just a drink, but the drink, the cratur, the bevvy. It’s unsurprising that Scots drink to excess. The peoples of all sun-starved, northern countries do. So too do disenfranchised natives, whose self-respect...

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Controversial plans for a new security hall at Parliament have been branded “more than bonkers,” by Dame Campanula Steel, former presiding orifice of the joint. That sounds fair enough, you say, without knowing anything about the subject. Well, put it like this: he described interventions in Scotland’s referendum by Derek – is it Derek? – Cameron, the Britisher prime minister, merely as “bonkers”. Lord Steel made his claims in an intemperate letter to an English newspaper (The Scotsman). Confronted by Holyrood, he denied being inebriated at the time, adding: “Yaiz are a’ muppets and ah’ll stick the heid on ye, ken?” Later, our research revealed that we’d mistaken Dame Steel for a dosser. We apologised to the dosser, who told us many people made the same mistake. Textual analysts among [...]

I offer the following for your consideration (with the original spellings, grammar and punctuation): “i wish they would just sod off! let them have their independence, and see them suffer without English money, which they have been quite willing to take without a grumble” “The scots want to go it alone, BUT would still want our money i bet??????????.Cut them loose and see who comes back in say 10 years time??????, build hadrians wall higher again i say. Give them their own country and passport, then if they stay in England, then they would be classed as immigrants!!” “Should Scotland become independant, does that mean the billions the UK sends them will be stopped?” “yes goodbye scotland thanks for coming, just pay your own way yes.” “Bin Scotland Bin Wales [...]

Yeah, I know, poverty is all relative. Certainly, all my relatives are poor. But who else do we mean when we talk about the poor? The odious expression, “The poor are always with us”, begs — as it were — that very question. There’s the poverty of the western world, even with its variations (little in Scandinavia, enough in Scotland), and then there’s poverty in the Third World, where it’s all a little bit “them”, at least from the point of view of “us”. I should first, in this narrative or exegesis, deal with the notion of the happy, virtuous poor and the unhappy, complaining rich. Obviously, at some levels, there is something in this. I have rarely been abroad, being unable to master the different walking styles and remaining [...]

They’re a’ oot, as it were, tae line their ain poackits. I speak of the electorate, our dumb chums whose X in the box determines all our futures. A remarkable poll showed numbers voting for independence would rocket if they could be guaranteed an extra £500 a year. That’s about £42 a month, or £1.37 a day. That’s the price of sovereignty in modern-day Scotland. That, seemingly, is more important than all your high-falutin’ principles and ideals. What a shower of clots. They could have been better off for years, like their neighbours in Norway, but just repeated the mantra that they were too wee and too poor and, uniquely of all the countries in the West, incapable of running their own affairs. Perhaps they are. Did you ever stop [...]