IT was almost three years ago to the day. Mid September 2014, the referendum for Scottish independence beckoned and the air was filled with hope.

My views on independence are well documented; being on the losing side of the debate focuses the mind and makes you wonder about this singular belief you have held since you started actually believing in anything other than the desire to play rugby for Scotland. A journey that started in March 2013 offered an unlikely victory for Yes. When the vote was first announced, fewer than a third of polled Scots expressed a preference to restore the Scottish nation and dissolve the Union. (This was a marked improvement over the 1995 Mori poll that suggested only one in every five Scots were for independence.)

A week away from the big day, however, I suffered a rare sleepless night. I tossed and turned, turned and tossed and worried about independence, something that had never happened before or since.

I only had one concern: having been ruled centrally from the ever-expanding, massive metropolis of London, could we be sure that an independent Scotland wouldn’t fall into the self same trap? We all know that Scotland is disproportionately dominated by its central belt; the M8 corridor connects our castle capital to the city of cool. Glasgow and Edinburgh (and the swathe in between) have become over-invested and over-developed to the detriment of that which lies to the north and the south. While the Highlands will always trap tourists, infrastructure and improvement, the south of Scotland has been embarrassingly overlooked, so that chunks of Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway have struggled to establish themselves while all the focus is about Glasgow and/or Edinburgh.

This Saturday I’ll be in Stranraer, cooking oysters, eating oysters and generally having a great time. Welcome to the Stranraer Oyster Festival! I had no idea that Dumfries and Galloway’s second biggest town had such a bejewelled oyster history. Oysters have been farmed in Loch Ryan since before the Union. And while supplies of the shellfish are diminishing they are burgeoning in this loch. On any given day, a couple of thousand can be farmed and sold.

I knew nothing of this before this year. Stranraer for me was the place you caught the ferry tae Larne, then on to Belfast before catching a train to Dublin. And, in the days before the free market and consumerism, when the shops were shut on a Sunday my pal Khalid would drive us doon tae his dad’s petrol station where we would drink terrible machine-generated coffee and think ourselves sophisticats.

Given its tucked-away nature, you would never find yourself in Stranraer unless you were going there. Traffic from the south motors its way past and us city slickers seem uninterested in exploring the amazing places just a hop, skip and a jump from our urban doorsteps.

When the Larne ferry was based in Stranraer, the town was a bustling place. Then, out of the blue, the port was moved six miles up the coast to Cairnryan.

Stranraer was facing a future as a ghost town. Scotland has far too many of those once thriving towns that now sit, sorry and silent; something as simple as a single business relocating can adversely alter the nature of a community. Stranraer could have let that happen. Could have, but didn’t. Businesses got together and the Oyster Festival was born.

Politicians focus on the big cities and we too easily forget the myriad communities beyond them. If we truly believe in unshackling ourselves from a government in a city miles away, one that doesn’t have our best interests at heart, how foolish would it be if we made the same mistake within the Scottish nation?

There are places like Stranraer all over Scotland. Places that should be supported and encouraged by the citizens of the central belt. Not all of these places have the admirable wherewithal and vision to reinvent themselves. Some of us are only too happy to pronounce our patriotic pride, to kiss the figurative badge but do nothing more than that.

But while independence isn't currently on the agenda we need to ensure that if and when it comes, we are in the best shape possible to rise to the challenge of the new dawn. We need to learn the lessons of inequality and start now to redress the imbalance that seems to define life in contemporary Scotland.

If we manage that then the world can truly be our oyster.