Vote ‘Yes’ for a More Preposterous Scotland

I was rather stunned the other day to hear that our neighbour Lorna Declan-Fall – well, neighbour may be stretching it a bit as there are two villages and a 5,000-acre woodland in between – had put up a big blue ‘Yes’ sign on her castle roof.  This rather spoiled my tally of 100% ‘No’ voters amongst people I actually am friends with and who aren’t card-carrying communists (and more earls’ sons are Red than you’d readily believe).  So I drove the eight miles in the Landy to borrow a cup of sugar and have a little chinwag about it.  Remembering an episode involving right and wrong husbands back in the ’70s I had to be absolutely sure Lorna wasn’t voting ‘Yes’ to the status quo (which, I say for the benefit of our many delightful readers in Poland, Canada and so forth, is not actually an option on the ballot paper).

She greeted me at her W.H. Playfair-designed gate lodge, wearing a feileadh mòr, blue ‘Yes’ logos in grease-paint on each cheek, and a saltire-painted targe.

‘Will you be joining me, Cynthia, in voting to kick the English out?’ she shouted, in an uncharacteristically Scottish accent.

‘Lorna, three of your great-grandfathers were from England, and so were three of mine.  Don’t you think that would be a bit counterproductive?’

‘Stop “talking down” Scotland!  Scaremonger!’ she yelled, adding in a whisper: ‘The servants might hear you.’

She pulled me into the lodge, shut the door swiftly and checked all the eaves for eavesdroppers.

‘Thank God you’re here.  My accent was starting to crack.’

She explained in a plummy rush that back in May she had been doorstepped by a group of Yes campaigners, who expressed what the police call ‘robust’ anti-English views, and in proximate fear of robbery or arson told them that she was voting Yes and gave them a twenty-pound note.  This was overheard by her butler, Menzies, who promptly joined the Yes campaign – ‘perhaps to please me’ – and had been monitoring her commitment level ever since in a decidedly old-school Presbyterian fashion.  There was a daily Yes meeting in the second-best drawing room, as well as a weekly one in the chapel, featuring a saltire-covered Stool of Repentance for those who, during the week, had been accused of harbouring pro-English sentiments.  These meetings were attended by everyone except Jones the underbutler, a Welshman and suspected ex-Tory who now stayed in his room at all times, ever since his clothes were all vandalised with the words, ‘Go Back to Whales’.

‘But for heaven’s sake, Lorna, what do they actually want?  I mean, is there a grievance, an actual grievance, even one?’

‘Too many public servants,’ Lorna said after struggling to think for a minute.  ‘If they have a problem with something now, they can complain to their MP, MEP, MSP, and three different supreme courts.  After Yes, this six will be reduced to just one of each – both purely Scottish.  So much easier to get one’s head round.’

‘They want to get rid of Bob?’ I said, aghast.  Bob is our local MP, a farmworker’s son who went to the village school in Airnefitchie and then won a scholarship to King’s College Aberdeen.  Since getting elected he has devoted himself to lowering the price of petrol in rural areas like this one, and of course, saving the kestrel.  He’s Liberal or SNP; I can never remember which because the colours and the policies are so similar.

‘Yes, of course,’ Lorna replied.  ‘Bob is part and parcel of the out-of-touch rich Westminster elite, who oppress us by making us pay the same taxes as everyone else even though we have higher housing prices, more pollution and inferior public services.’

‘I see.’  Dark days for elitism, to be sure, if Bob qualifies.  ‘Hold on, don’t you mean “lower housing prices, less pollution and superior public services”?’

‘I don’t even know anymore!’ Lorna wailed, tears streaking the Yesses on her cheeks into Yiises. 

‘But other than getting rid of Bob and the supreme court, what do the people in your household actually want?’ I asked, with a sinking heart.

‘Well, Menzies wants the permanent and unrivalled establishment of the Church of Scotland and an end to this “gay-rights nonsense”.  My son Jamie wants the disestablishment of all religions and gay rights to be extended to owls, capercaillies and red squirrels.  Mrs. Frew wants the extra £1,300 per year in oil money for the next fifty years, and her son expects the replacement of oil with more wind turbines within three years.  Gordon wants to keep the pound, Aggie wants the euro and Keith wants the re-establishment of the silver merk of thirteen shillings and fourpence…’

‘But surely they see that these things couldn’t all happen?’

‘Au contraire, Cynthia.  They’ve all been promised, and disbelieving in any “Yes” promise is the cardinal sin: the sin of negativity.’

‘All promised?’

‘Of course.  Why, your own husband said he had been promised the restoration of feudalism – possibly including the House of Stuart, I can’t remember – and my daughter says your son Alester was promised that Aberdeenshire and Morayshire would become an anarcho-syndicalist collective with group sex daily at 11AM and 3PM, with work required only in between times, with a break for luncheon.

‘Anyway, I must go now, or I’ll be late for the evening “Prayer for ‘Yes’” session below stairs.’  She opened the door with a long creak and sloped away, the tail of her giant plaid trailing in the mud behind.

De-programming on a massive scale will almost certainly be required.  Sadly, I don’t quite think the man to do it is Alistair Darling of the Nose campaign, or – God forbid – David William Donald Cameron, possibly 5th laird of Blairmore and also Prime Minister of, well, something or other.

As I drove home, I thought of Her Majesty’s wise words: we should all think very carefully about the future and keep calm and carry on, leaving the pitchforks and torches locked up at home where they belong.