Poll

It is a historic occasion: not the sort of thing that happens every day. Indeed, it may never happen again, depending how the vote goes. And note, by the way, I prefer a historic rather than the commonly encountered, but unsettling quaint, an historic. Just as I tend to refer to a history exam, or at least I would if I was unfortunate enough to have to sit one. It has been many years, incidentally, since I last sat a history exam. And I only got a C, which was disappointing, and rankles to this day.

Getting back to the point, today has seen the momentous referendum on whether Scotland should be an independent country and separate from the United Kingdom. After years (if not centuries) of fervent discussion, the poll has come and, in the last few minutes, gone. The results may start to come in at any moment, or, more likely, during the early hours of the morning, when hopefully I will be fast asleep. The polls have narrowed over the last few weeks, with perhaps only a couple of percentage points now separating the two camps. So either the final result will turn out to be very close, or we will discover that the Scottish people do not take opinion polls seriously and deliberately give misleading answers.

Either way, the future composition and governance of the whole of the UK will change after tonight. Potentially Scotland will go its own way, leading to several years of a difficult untangling and prising apart of Scotland from the rest of the UK. The Yes campaign has the advantage of a certain romantic idealism about it, whereas the No campaign has inevitably a negative pallor: it's difficult to sound positive when recommending the status quo, especially in the current economic climate. But we shall see. No one has asked my opinion. Probably because I don't live in Scotland.