The destroyer of worlds

’Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’

Even with its gramatical error, its still a great quote.

Its from a Sanskrit text, most famously uttered by J. Robert Oppenheimer after witnessing the first ever atomic bomb test in New Mexico; the Trinity test.

Contemporary accounts differ, Oppenheimer himself said he said it, other times he said he just thought it. Others who were present say he just said ‘Shit, it worked’ which lets face it would be much more realistic, albeit not quite as dramatic.

My guess is he thought it some time after the event and just squeezed it into the historical narrative. I know I would.

The trinity test was part of the Manhattan project led by Oppenheimer as the allies raced to build the first atomic bomb.

The test took place on July 16^th 1945 and 21 days later Enola Gay was heading towards Hiroshima with Little Boy and the rest is history.

21 days. Think about that for just a second. Before July 16^th everything was still theoretical, no one knew if it would even work and in less than a month they had built it. Tested it. Built another two, dropped them both and for all intents and purposes brought WWII to an end. 

They also killed a staggering amount of civilians in the process.

I understand there was a war on and normal timelines don’t apply. Every day counted more than anyone alive today can imagine but still, three weeks. I find this incredible. When I think of what I can get done in three weeks, its pitiful in comparison.

They also took risks. The science behind the Trinity tests were solid(ish) however there were a group of scientists at the time warning that no one knew how or when the chain reaction started by the detonation would end.

In simple terms they never knew if the chain reaction would stop 100 meters from the site, 100 miles from the site or just not stop at all. Like a lightning fast monster blob, devouring everything in its path and just getting bigger and stronger.

They didn’t know with absolute certainty that the world wouldn’t just blow up.

But someone still pressed the button…

Stephen Hawking recently came out with a statement that in his opinion Artificial Intelligence is the biggest threat to mankind. I would agree with him on this, I do have some issues with his black hole relative time warp worm hole theory but on AI I think we are both aligned. Which I’m sure is reassuring for him.

Yes, AI. Like the chain reactive risks of the Trinity test I think AI poses a similar threat – global destruction. Or at least the destruction of the human race. I’m not thinking in terms of large robots with guns, I’m thinking of a small software program developed with two very simple objectives; improve itself and grow.

Where would this e-blob end? It might just do nothing or it might take over the whole world. Before we could think it, it would have done it.

It might even at some point resort to developing heavily accented large muscle bound robots to wipe out us humans who would surely become an obstacle to the programs self improvement mandate.

Who would press enter to set that thing in motion? With the cursor blinking at the ‘run’ icon would you press it, just to see what happens?

A big red button labelled DO NOT PRESS! Or that red handle on an aircraft door which says do not touch in flight?

Tell me you haven’t even thought about it as you queue for the toilet…

Temptation is horrible. The temptation to do something I know I shouldn't can quickly become irrisistable and once the idea is in my head it would take a Trinity sized event to remove it. Or sex.

I stopped smoking full time some years ago.

I say full time because anyone who knows me would scoff if I was to say anything else.

I stopped simply because of the health thing. If I could smoke with no detrimental affect to my health I would, I really really enjoy smoking. Don’t care about the smell and the other negative things, I enjoy it.

Problem is it will also probably kill me. And I don’t like smoking that much. But it still is tempting.

If you offered me the life of Keith Richards and the constitution of Keith Richards I would say thank you very much and light up immediately. Unfortunately Keith is a freak and I doubt very much I have his freakish ability to avoid death so I stopped smoking.

So when the smoking ban was being discussed and then finally implemented a few years ago I had mixed feelings. I totally understand the medical reasons surrounding passive smoking and the rights of the non smokers who also want to go out for a drink. I understand the concerns for the staff.

I get it all but also know that I never went to the pub for the good of my health and that there is nothing nicer than sitting down with a pint, a newspaper and lighting up.

Anyway, at least in the UK that’s now out of the question and if you want to smoke you are forced to huddle in a doorway avoiding the rain and the late Friday night weegies staggering dangerously by.

Then someone in China invented E-cigarettes. Hurrah! A solution!

It would seem not.

E-cigarettes are also banned from public places, airplanes and the usual places normal smokers are shunned.

But I don’t get it. E-cigarettes give off a harmless water vapour, there are no known negative health issues from this vapour. On an airplane it would probably be actually beneficial to have some water vapour mixing with the drier than the Sahara cabin air.

There are no passive smoking issues, so why cant you puff away on your e-cigarette indoors, next to non smokers or ten miles up?

Because it normalises smoking behaviour apparently. In other words, because they look like cigarettes.

And this I think is an issue. A big issue. The precedent being set here is concerning.

Even if I wasn’t fully supporting, I did agree with the smoking ban. Because the medical proof was overwhelming. But just because something looks like something else doesn’t make it bad, and it certainly shouldn’t be banned.

What about alcohol? If you cant smoke an e-cigarette in a pub because it normalises smoking behaviour, what about drinking alcohol? Doesn’t drinking alcohol in a public place normalise drinking alcohol and I can guarantee the collateral damage caused by alcohol is significantly greater than any other vice known to man.

So will we find ourselves being banned from drinking alcohol in pubs for exactly the same reason at some point in whats shaping up to be a depressingly dull future?

Toy guns, action man, video games, movies. If we can ban harmless e-cigarettes then surely everything is up for grabs?

They have banned something, not on scientific grounds but on aesthetic grounds.

My advice would be to make them look like balloons or pilot masks or shoes or anything which doesn’t look vaguely like a cigarette.

Let people choose for themselves. If they want to live like Keith, let them, so long as it doesn’t bother/interfere with me why should I care? If you want to be a lard arse and live off king sized mars bars so be it, you don’t need to ban them though. I sometimes like to eat king sized mars bars too.

Put simply if its not harming anyone else then why should you, I or anyone for that matter care?

I think another, quiet chain reaction has started with the introduction of the smoking ban, the supersize ban and the generally intrusive big brother nanny state.

It certainly wont have the long lasting implications of the Trinity tests, it wont have the human race eliminating consequences of artificial intelligence but it’s going to have consequences.

So lets stop it now before I find myself unable to eat a kebab, drink a pint, wave a plastic gun or even make a vaguely offensive statement in a public place.

You know, if it was to come to this I might press the big red button myself.

Just for the hell of it.

Rampant Stallion

My shower gel is called ‘Energy’.

No I haven started giving names to my toiletries. Nivea has though. And they made Energy, just for men, like me.

It has a scientific looking graphic on the bottle which looks a bit like a DNA sequence but I assume its supposed to signify that a lot of breakthrough technology and research went into creating the product. It’s part of their male product line so the design errs towards the industrial. The bottle is square and has a blue and lime green colour.

Energy I presume is supposed to give me Energy when I use it. I don’t know this for sure because apart from its name everything else is written in German or French but it smells nice and with a name like that what else could be inferred?

Does it actually give me Energy? No, it doesn’t.

It does get me clean though, assuming I’m using it properly. If they were just being honest it should be called Nivea ‘clean’. For men. But then that probably wouldn’t pass the first, or any test which must exist in the mens marketing department at Biersdorf.

So when does a product claim move from being just marketing hype, to lying?

How about all those moisturisers claiming to knock decades off your face or cellulite removers promising you the arse of an 18year old?

Do you think anyone actually challenges the claims made? I know its part of the cut and thrust of business to challenge the claims made by a competitor but has a consumer ever challenged such a thing? I don’t know.

It seems to be a normal thing nowadays for people to promise the earth then when it comes to actually delivering, ignoring the promise was ever made in the first place.

Or, when asked, using impressive linguistic gymnastics to say they didn’t actually say what you thought you had heard. 

Think Bill Clinton explaining that when he said he never had sexual relations what he failed to mention was that he knew fully the phrase ‘sexual relations’ didn’t actually mean or include a number activities most normal people would consider sexual acts.

What would happen if the world was suddenly and without any warning invaded by aliens?

I’ve seen the movies.

What happens is they blow up a city or two in the US and then as an afterthought a few more around the world. The world is of course outraged, nowhere more so than the United States. 

We see shots of cities razed to the ground. A second or two of dark people running around wearing turbans speaking a funny language and being vaporised before we return to the US.

Enter Jeff Goldblum, or any other geeky looking guy. He figures out the aliens achilles heel and suddenly everyone around the world is high fiving or the cultural equivalent somewhere else.

The invasion lasts about an hour and half and Jeff gets his girl.

Apart from a geeky guy getting laid and the whole nasty affair lasting less than the eco cycle of my washing machine I think this would be pretty close to what would happen in reality.

I say this because I think we are pretty good at dealing with sudden, need to be fixed now, problems.

Take Ebola. We are throwing money and resources at the problem because it’s an immediate threat. Its now, its in our face and we are dealing with it. In a short time the current outbreak will be contained and it will become another avian flu; something which was a problem a few years ago.

What would happen then if we had a warning from the Aliens and the warning said they would invade in 300 years from now?

Well, Jeff would remain a celibate geek, the funny foreigners would probably say something about it but;

1. We don’t understand what they are saying and 

2. Shit, that’s 300 years away, chill.

We would do nothing. 

Because most problems which we need to address need to have a four or eight year life time otherwise there is a good chance it will be ignored or, as in most cases, just pushed away.

If you are someone who wants to fuck with the current status quo of the world make sure you have a longer timeline than four years and make sure your approach is a drip, drip one. Build it up slowly. This way, most likely, you will be successful.

If you decide to stand up and do an Islamic State or fly an airline into a building or two then more fool you. You will lose.

Global warming, climate change or the environment, call it what you will is a perfect example of my point. The damage is clear, the science is even clearer but the timeline is less clear.

At some, undetermined point in time in the future the world will become an uninhabitable place. It wont be an overnight thing, it will be gradual. The slow spread of cancer has already started but you, I and the next few generations might not even notice. It’s the ones after that who will be pissed off. 

That’s when the aliens really start vaporising cities.

Apparently democracy is the way to go. It’s the gold standard for running a country, province or even continent. We invented it, and still cant find fault in it. 

We love it so much we have determined the whole world should have it, even if they don’t want it.

But it has its issues. Democracy is far from perfect.

Firstly democracy has no built in mechanism to hold those in power to account for the claims they might make before actually assuming power. Think the liberal democrats and their tuition fee pledge. 

Apart from pissing off a lot of liberal democrat voters what’s come of that lie? Not a lot .

Secondly it lets the people decide and candidates can be re-elected. 

In general, you, I and everyone else are only concerned with today, tomorrow and at a stretch our children’s tomorrow. Anything beyond that falls into the category ‘someone else can deal with it’ .

If the aliens tell us they will invade in the year 2342 I doubt very much the current campaigning candidates will be talking much about investing in an Alien defence research body. 

What we need are candidates or parties who are committed to a single term.

What we need are conviction politicians who don’t care about pissing everyone off today for the good of tomorrow.

France is a great example of this. 

France, the founding country of liberty and socialism. France, the country which invented champagne, topless beaches, arrogance and Agincourt. I also predict France will become bankrupt within my lifetime.  

I say this because the moment any president tries to make changes to avoid this, the country goes on strike and votes as soon as possible for the candidate who tells everyone he is not going to upset the status quo.

So, the status quo remains and the country moves slowly towards the fiscal abyss. Gold plated youthful retirement schemes, an unsustainable private/public equation and all of it underpinned and supported by a powerful, unreasonable, unrealistic and often violent groups of unions.

Yes, France will become an economic wasteland unless something changes soon.

What France needs is a French version of Thatcher.  I know the resulting image is pretty horrific but I never said it would be pretty.

It needs to be someone who doesn’t care about public opinion, someone who doesn’t care about how hard or difficult something is. Someone who is willing to forgo getting re-elected in the interest of change.

But it’s unlikely to happen. The abyss I mentioned is not tomorrow. It’s not even the day after that so why would anyone worry about it right now?

I don’t profess to knowing the answer to this but I do think we are stuck in a 'democracy is best’ situation to not see its flaws nor think about changing them.

Recently Scotland voted no to independence from the United Kingdom. It was a close run thing and a great example of the best of democracy. That is, giving the people of a country the choice to choose for itself, free from intimidation and violence. 

The vote went no but the promises made to secure this no vote during the, often loud, campaigning verged on the desperate.

Now, after the dust has settled, what will come of those promises?

If a nation votes on something as momentous as this and that vote is based on promises made during the campaign then there must be, has to be, some form of recourse if the promises just disappear after the vote.

I for one hope they are kept.

I also hope we see more individuals who are willing to step up, change the status quo and then step down again. Because it’s the stepping down which matters.

Even Thatcher didn’t get this and outstayed her welcome. She should have moved aside after crushing the unions, but she didn’t.

If you know you are going to step down before you are elected. If you have no interest in being re-elected you will be removing the main reason most leaders fail.

If you are a person who believes what you believe. If you lay out those beliefs in your manifesto and you are elected on the basis of that manifesto. If you actually implement your manifesto without regard for the noise it might cause. If you are that person then my advice would be to run for office, apply to be an MP, MSP or even MEP. 

Whatever you run for, I will vote for you and I will hold you to account.

I will expect you to deliver on your promises and if you do ironically you might even get my vote again.

Isn’t this how it’s supposed to work?

Anyway, that’s enough - rant over.

I don’t expect anyone to actually do this. I also didn’t really expect to feel energised after showering with Energy either. 

Disappointment in shower gel and politicians is something I am pre-programmed to ignore. Its normal. It’s how things are. Why would I think differently?

It doesn’t stop me hoping though.

I've just purchased a new shower gel, called ‘Rampant Stallion’.

Lets see…..

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Would you eat a spider? 
I wouldn’t.

Even if I was starving and ended up in such a god forsaken place where the only form of sustenance happened to be spiders. 

I’m not even sure if a spider would offer any sustenance would it? Certainly not singularly. And I’m definitely not eating a handful or a bucket of spiders.

I could eat a slug.
I could even eat a human at a stretch; if he/she were already dead and there really wasn’t any real alternative. Like in that movie about the plane crash or if I happened to be lost at sea, with a handy corpse beside me. In that sort of desperate scenario I might be tempted to eat a few strips of carpaccio bum cheek. 

I would try to eat grass, wood and all sorts of other distasteful things. But definitely not a spider.

I’m not even afraid of spiders, I quite like them. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend and mosquitos are my enemy then spiders must be my friends.

Still wouldn’t eat one though, friendly or otherwise.

If I could I would happily remove mosquitos from existence.

I recognise there might be some food chain implications with this but if the removal of mosquitos from the world meant a small bird in Africa or a rare Nicaraguan water vole became extinct I would be ok with that. I would consider this acceptable collateral damage if we were to rid the world of its most annoying, and deadly, insect.

I read somewhere that if the world started eating insects food shortages and famine would disappear.

The logic here seems to make sense, insects are plentiful, insects are a good source of protein and for the most part insects are not really that hard to catch. That is apart from the single stuka dive bomber mosquito who resides in my bedroom all summer - every fucking summer.

I am perfectly ok with everyone, myself included, starting to eat insects but with one caveat (apart from the spider one). We don’t start farming them.

We eat the insects which exist today but we don’t start setting up slug farms or mosquito ranges or ant batteries. I don’t want to see a free range beetles or anything like that on the shelves at Tesco’s. If we start farming them, there will be more of them and this would defeat the point.

I want to rid the world of hunger and reduce the number of flying, buzzing, crawling things at the same time. Which is not too much to ask, is it?

But if we start adding beetles into our diet then what will happen to the pigs, cows and sheep? If consumer demand for these animals were to drop would they just die out? Or go wild, like planet of the apes?

I think pigs would be ok fending for themselves. Pigs are super intelligent and in some places still roam wild. Pigs I think would quickly reinvent themselves and become carnivorous wild forest dwelling hunters.   

Don’t know about cows, I guess we would probably keep looking after them so we could have decent shoes and handbags, and milk.

Sheep would die out, of that there’s no doubt.

Sheep are the stupidest animals ever invented, dafter than red setters even. I can’t imagine sheep ever having been a wild animal. I understand they must have at one point, unless we did actually invent them, but that wild, street savviness DNA strand which pigs still have has long since been bred out of sheep.

They might survive for a while wandering aimlessly into town centers with poo on their bum fur, jumping in front of cars/buses/trains for no apparent reason and eating grass but eventually they will become extinct.

Because they are stupid. It would be a shame but such is the law of the natural world.

Stupid animals die out or so Darwin said. The Dodo was daft as a brush and look what happened to it. You don’t even need to have met or interacted with a dodo to know it was a stupid animal - its name is proof enough.

Yes, stupidity can be deadly. 

Can I kill a cat? Is that allowed and not against the law?

I'm very allergic to them, I don't own a cat, have never owned a cat so why is it ok for my neighbours cat to come traipsing over to my garden to shit, sleep, play, stalk and do other annoying feline things there?

Can I, for example turn my garden into a very very cat unfriendly place; tuna laced with cyanide, bear traps that sort of thing?

I would of course let my neighbours know in advance and tell them all will be ok so long as Fluffy stays the hell out of my garden. Its then up to them how they do this...

Anyway, cats are not stupid thats clear. In a wild animal world I think all cats will survive very well indeed. Its the stupid ones which will die out.

Stupid insects on the other hand seem to thrive. 

It seems like Darwinism is reversed when it comes to the insect world. Daddy long legs are an excellent example of successful stupid-ness, how they have survive is beyond me. But they do.

So lets start eating them.

If we did, the world will be less hungry. Probably. It would definitely be more interesting, pigs will go Rambo in the forests, sheep will be a thing of the past, cows will still be there and maybe, just maybe, my resident mosquito will stop dive bombing me every night.

But I'm still not eating a spider……

Size matters

I have a son called Cameron.

Its a good solid Scottish name, I think it means beautiful one, or crooked nose, or something somewhere in between, I forget. 

But regardless of the etymology I like it.

Cameron has a Scottish name, a Scottish dad and his very own hand made kilt but the reality is he is about as Scottish as Mel Gibson.

He’s also four years old, so minor things like nationality don’t really trouble him just now. Ice cream, Paw Patrol, getting something his younger sister doesn’t have and staying awake after nine o clock in the evening are his primary concerns.

Nationality is something he can neither spell nor say and is very very far from his mind.

But this will change at some point.

I travel a lot and meet all sorts of people. Generally after shaking hands and exchanging banal pleasantries the subject of nationality crops up. In most cases its pretty obvious, accents normally give everyone away. Its hard not to spot an Italian, German, Englishman or Frenchman.

Eastern Europe is a little bit more tricky. I have been known to call a Latvian Russian or a Croat a Serb but this is forgivable. 

Well it is, once.

If you travel enough eventually you learn to spot the differences.

I used to find it hard to understand why someone from abroad couldn’t tell the difference between a Glasgow, Yorkshire, Manchester or even a Scouser accent. I knew they were different, don’t ask me what any of them are actually saying but at least I can roughly point out where they come from based on the tone of the unintelligible barrage as soon as they open their mouths.

But this was before I tried to see (hear) the difference between the Bavarians and the folks who come from Hamburg. There is a difference, it just takes some tuning of the ear to hear it. To your average German its like each are speaking different languages, to me they were all just foreigners speaking a funny, bad guy off of the war movies, language.

Only now am I sort of able to recognise someone from Hamburg or someone from Munich or understand the difference between an Austrian accent and a Berlin one. But this has taken me fourteen years of living in the Germanic part of the world to be able to do so.

Cameron doesn’t have a Scottish accent. He also isn’t really Scottish, but if he isn’t Scottish then what is he?

He has a British Passport and an American one.

If we followed the rules of national football he would be eligible to play for Scotland (me & my dad), England (my mum), USA (his mum), Taiwan (his mums parents) and Switzerland (where he lives) so this doesn’t really help him much.

I am sure at some point he will decide on a country and stick with that. Like him choosing the football team he will eventually support.

His choices right now are American or British. I say British here because being  Scottish is more a state of mind than anything else. If you hold a British passport then you could equally claim to be Scottish as much as anyone else holding a similar passport.

There is no Scottishness test as far as I am aware, you just say it and I guess you are it. I could say I was Welsh should I wish. Not sure why anyone would actually do that but I could if I was, say, mad.

What he will not do is claim to be a citizen of the world. 

I have actually met some people who genuinely described themselves as this.

‘Where do you come from?’ says me

‘Nowhere, everywhere, I am a citizen of the world’ says he

‘Right’ says me. I then wander off muttering ‘wanker’ under my breath.

No, my son will be guided in such matters and he will need to choose properly.

Come September the 19^th he might not be able to say, British and be done with it. He might actually have to say Scottish, British or American.

In fact come to think of it so might I.

I consider myself very Scottish. I live very unhealthily, I like whisky, I own a kilt, my dads Scottish, I support Scotland, I was born in Scotland, I spent all my childhood in Scotland and automatically say slainte whenever I toast someone with a dram. Surely this makes me Scottish?

I left home aged 16 and have been kind of travelling ever since so my accent has eroded but still. Just because I don’t pay tax there anymore doesn’t make me less Scottish…

It seems like the polls are narrowing in the run up to the referendum. The bookies still have the No campaign ahead but the momentum is definitely with the Yes campaign. Everywhere I look there are crowds of people saying, shouting, singing and graffiting Yes.

The Yes campaign are noisy to say the least but then changing the status quo was never going to happen quietly.

About a year ago, I wrote a blog bemoaning the fact there was little information about the issues at hand, the general thrust of my blog was it was generally too quiet. We needed debate, loud debate, front and center. This is such a monumental decision we could not go into it blind.

Seems I got my wish.

There is misinformation all over the place but at least people are talking about it. With such a volume of political dialogue going on I wonder what on earth people will talk about afterwards.

But this is good. This is how it should be and given the emotive nature of the decision the discussions appear to be relatively good natured. There have been some instances of eejits from both sides taking things too far but on a whole most people seem to be accepting, regardless of the result, everyone will need to get on with each other again come September 19^th.

So for what its worth. From a half English expat who still considers himself Scottish, here is my last opinion on the whole affair before everyone goes to the polls.

I would be voting No on September 18^th. Not because I think Scotland couldn’t manage its own affairs because it clearly could. Not even because I think Scotland wouldn’t be better off, financially, as an independent nation. It probably would. And this certainly isn’t because I am afraid of the unknown or any less patriotic than a Yes voter.

I also don’t believe the sky will fall down whether the vote goes No, or Yes. The scaremongering on both sides is just false and frankly silly.

I would be voting No simply because I believe there is a strength in Great Britain. This strength does not come individually from London or Manchester or Glasgow or even Inverness. It’s the sum of the parts which gives us the strength. As a combined nation we have managed to punch well above our weight for longer than we really should have.

Scotland by itself will be a small, maybe even prosperous, nation. I do not however accept the notion that small always equals good. I don’t accept the studies which look at Switzerland or Norway or another small, wealthy, happy country and claim this is because they are a small nimble country and then simply apply this principle to Scotland. There are plenty of miserable, poor small countries in the world as well.

Small doesn’t always mean prosperity. Its what you do, not your size which matters, or so I have been told.

Switzerland is prosperous, not because its small but because it hasn’t joined the EU, kept itself out of every major conflict there has been, kept its mouth shut when everyone around it was shouting and made sure it stayed friendly with everyone, even the bad guys. How would this sit in the minds of the average Scot?

What about Nato? Scotland would join Nato that’s clear, but Scotland would go from being a major pillar of Nato to a dependent nation of Nato.

We will provide troops and money relative to our size and capability but the whole point of Nato is that the big nations look after the small nations to eliminate the need for nuclear or military proliferation. However unlikely the situation, if push comes to shove, Scotland would be asking for help from South of the border because we would not be capable of defending ourselves.

Great Britain is part of the G8. A yes vote will effectively be voting ourselves off of this top table. I don’t know if this is good, or bad but I for one would prefer to have a voice rather than no voice at all.

An independent Scotland will be a small nation on the fringes of Europe. A bit like Iceland perhaps. Just with less volcanoes.  Now I have never been to Iceland and don’t know any Icelanders so I cant say if they are happy, sad, wealthy or otherwise. I do know though that Iceland is not foremost in anyone’s mind when world issues are being discussed or decided. I know Norway, Sweden or any number of smaller nations are also in the same boat. They don’t really have a say.

Not a proper one anyway.

Scotland as part of the United Kingdom has a voice and is listened to. Scotland as an independent nation will not, no matter how hard we shout.

Governments change, policies change, in fact everything changes given a long enough timeline. This vote is not about now. It’s about forever.

The bedroom tax will disappear, as will Cameron, Clegg and Salmond. Representation in Westminster will be there and then not be there, that’s the nature of democracy. Crossrail will get completed, the trams in Edinburgh will keep running (maybe) and North Sea oil will run out eventually. All of this I can guarantee.

Today Scotland has a voice and is a major player on the world stage because its part of Great Britain. It has a strength it really shouldn’t have on account of being part of the UK. This is something we will lose immediately. We will not be capable of intervening in world issues or anything for that matter. Even if its something we should be intervening in.

We will become a small inward looking nation because we will not have the voice to influence anything outside of our own borders. Now this might not be a bad thing for most of the population of Scotland, we might want to be a quiet nation who keeps its mouth shut and lives carefully and, potentially, prosperously on the fringes of Europe.

This might not matter to people who only think in terms of down the bottom of their street or doesn’t care what’s occurring in Iraq, Syria, Gaza but I’m not sure this is a fair representation of the Scottish people. 

Scottish people as I know them want to stand up, are proud and want to shout about it. Normally very loudly. We want to be involved, we want to make a difference. I just don’t think anyone will be listening after a yes vote and we will certainly not have the capability to do anything about it even if they were. 

We will have become an impotent nation in world stage terms.

Scottish people are not Norwegian and I for one don’t want to be Norwegian. They might be rich, good looking and have an average live expectancy of 150 but even still I don’t want to be Norwegian. I am proud of the heritage I have, and this is a heritage achieved as part of the United Kingdom. We simply wouldn’t have achieved anywhere near as much thus far had we been an independent nation for the last 300 years.

And I am convinced we will be doing a disservice to future generations by not allowing them to achieve as much in the future.

Anyway as I have said, this is just the opinion of a half English expat who doesn’t even get a vote. I will, along with everyone else in Scotland, be putting in an all nighter as the results come in. 

September 19^th is going to be ugly whichever way it goes.

And regardless of the result, I will still consider myself Scottish. I don’t care about the colour of the passport I carry and should Cameron have any sort of ability with a football he wont either.

Because the referendum might be important, the future of the United Kingdom might be hanging in the balance, a whole nation might be holding its breath but lets not get too carried away.

Football, after all, is much more important than all of that nonsense.