FLAGS mean different things to different people. One person’s Union Jack is a Brexit celebration, another’s is a pro-Union attack on the Scottish independence movement; to someone else, it's a joyful banner used to cheer on the athletes of Team GB.

We can’t be sure unless we know the person or the exact context – but we can have our suspicions and sometimes, we jump to conclusions. All too often the default position is to assume hatred, racism or power play is at the heart of the flag wielder, even when the issue at stake is as prosaic as soft fruit.

Personally, I have no great affection for flags of any colour. But when it was revealed that Tesco had ditched the Saltires on their strawberry packaging in favour of Union flags and British branding, I was irritated. Those symbols had been useful pointers to food provenance. When shopping at Tesco, I'd always favoured the Saltire strawberries – not so I could eat my way to independence, one soft fruit at a time, but because the Saltire told me that these berries were the most locally-grown, and therefore had racked up fewer food miles.

For many people, however, it wasn't the inconvenience of having to read a few more words on the packaging in order to find out whether their strawberries were from Fife or Kent. They were, as the social media storm that followed the news revealed, angered by this displacing of one national flag in favour of another, and its political resonance. Scotland was getting kicked out of play again by the big bad butcher’s apron. One tweeter, Eileen Brown, questioned whether this was “casual racism”. She added: "Hope it's not being caused by #Brexit." Others were talking of boycotting the store.

In all this, people seemed too quick to jump to conclusions. A story emerged that the move was triggered when English people complained that the Scots had their Saltires on their strawberries therefore the English should have George Crosses, but this was later declared to be a “misunderstanding”.

That we can get in such a stew about strawberry labelling is a sign of where we’re at in this post-Brexit, post-independence referendum moment of fraught relations. It’s a barometer of how much our political discourse has become entangled in issues of identity. We are all on tenterhooks, waiting to perceive slights, threats or insults to our national identity. English nationalists and Scottish nationalists, though both are sometimes identified as part of the same anti-establishment global movement, appear to be all too willing to see each other as the problem.

Tesco, of course, really should have been cleverer. They should have understood the intense feelings that exist around these two flags; that a flag is no longer, if it ever were, something that simply informs of provenance. The Saltire has become a shorthand for independence and protest – indeed it was used by Barcelona football fans when they were banned from using the Catalan flag. Meanwhile, the Union Jack has started to seem anti-Europe and anti-immigrant, regaining some of the racist, imperial resonance it had managed to shrug off for a little when in the 1990s it was reborn as the symbol of Cool Britannia.

Sensitivities are so acute that it’s impossible to deploy a flag in a careless fashion without finding yourself in hot water. Even patterns vaguely reminiscent of these key flags can seem provocative. One of my favourite dresses has stripes in red, white and blue, interlaced with a fourth band of beige which nobody ever notices. In 2014, as the referendum neared, I stopped wearing it, worried I would be misidentified as a No voter, and put it to the back of the wardrobe to be brought out in less tense times.

Tension, however, has increased. Flags seem ever more ubiquitous, not just on food products or at sporting events but also on social media profiles. Some, like the Common Weal’s Robin McAlpine, think we need to embrace the Saltire, do our best to invest it with the positive meanings brought to it by the independence movement, such as striving for economic equality.

But I’m still nervous. The problem with flags is that, whatever else you may project onto them, they’re associated with a particular type of patriotism, an "us and them" view of the world. Flags belong to a kind of theatrical staging of power play and aggression. I saw one version of it the day after the independence result, Union Jack flags piling into Glasgow's George Square attempting to drive out, with triumphalism, the wounded Saltires of the mournful Yes voters who had come together to commiserate.

Of course we can choose to see and use our flags differently – as symbols of openness or equality. But in that case, we have to accept that others may be doing the same. We need to cool our boots and adopt an attitude of tolerance towards even the flags of these isles we think we don’t like. We have to pause. Get over it. Allow ourselves to see flags for what they are: blocks of colour on bits of cloth.