Carlos Alba

Paul Wilson's “crime” was to be gay at a time when it was illegal to be homosexual and a member of the armed forces. The rule was stringently enforced, with undercover military police officers cruising bars, propositioning servicemen and women they suspected of being gay in order to “out” them.

While my Spanish heritage has given me and my family countless reasons to celebrate footballing success over the past decade-and-a-half, for decades Spain, like Scotland, were perennial under-achievers.

The polls had yet to open, far less close, when the predictions began. The 2024 General Election would be remembered as the moment when the threat of Scottish independence was extinguished forever.

There was a time when elections were straightforward affairs for voters, reflecting the binary nature of society and politics.

No two words are capable of striking visceral, Pavlovian fear in a young mind, than the soubriquet assigned to the man who briefly stalked a Glasgow dancehall in the late 1960s to make butchered corpses of three, bright young women who had their whole lives ahead of them.

While the Tartan Army merrily satirises our dire footballing performances, the response among too many Scots to the country’s failures in other areas is to shrug and accept them as inevitable. The waters are muddied by unionist politicians like Gordon Brown who continue to peddle worn-out sophisms about how the country’s many problems can be overcome by continued constitutional tinkering which would still leave the main centres of industry, commerce, and fiscal control in the south-east of England.

When prospective MPs and MSPs go to Politician School, it seems the first lesson they are taught is the holy trinity of political excuses.

When 50 or more Scottish writers gather to address an issue of pressing public concern, you know it’s time to look to the skies, imagine the vast expanse of the universe and consider the infinite multitude of more important things you could be thinking about.

It was the kind of searing, humid summer’s day when lifelong memories are forged, when the sights, sounds and the pulsating sensations were the building blocks of an unforgettable experience.

This week the scandal reaches its denouement, with the appearance at the public inquiry of Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, upon whose watch more than 1,100 postmasters were wrongly accused of theft and false accounting.