An elderly woman spat on just for wearing a Yes lapel sticker, the night out for a meal with her husband ruined by bullies.

Cars flying Union Jack flags full of thuggish, foul-mouthed men and women deliberately blocking a street adjacent to Glasgow's City Chambers, some of the women so drunk they were vomiting from the doors of their stationary vehicles onto the pavement as citizens passed hurriedly by disgusted and not a little intimidated.

Always the jeers, swearing, aggression, threats, often within feet of police officers on "crowd control duty".

What, I kept asking myself, might people from across the world where as a reporter I so often work make of my home city and country right now?

I got my answer the other night when some of those loyalist troublemakers blocked Glasgow's Cochrane Street, delaying an airport-bound bus. Worried about missing their flight, some Spaniards were forced to find another way to the airport.

"We've had such a fantastic time in Scotland, but these people ... why if they have won your referendum, are they so angry?" enquired one of the tourists bemused, as I gave him directions to a taxi rank.

"I've never been so ashamed to be Scottish," confessed the caretaker of my block of flats in Glasgow's Merchant City near George Square after witnessing much of the enmity.

I knew exactly what he meant. For two nights, one before and one after the referendum vote, I watched as my neighbourhood became a cauldron of bile and hatred fomented by a cadre of loyalist bullies and bigots.

In the wake of that grotesque bout of loathing, I find myself asking why it should be that the vast majority of decent ordinary Glaswegians and others should be subjected to such an experience. Such displays are not new, but the time has come to see them for what they are and the damage they do. They have no place in the Scotland that most of us hope for and aspire to.