Mark Smith

The man who fitted my dishwasher the other week used to work on the bins in Glasgow and told me how one day – in a story revealing him to be the hardest man the city has ever seen – he punched a rat in the face. Apparently, the animal lunged at him while he was emptying a bin and it seemed like his only option was an uppercut to its whiskery snout. It’s the perfect Glasgow anecdote really: violent, but funny.

It’s such a pity the word independence has no Rs in it because Stephen Flynn is good at Rs. He takes his time over them. They rattle and rev in his mouth. When he’s talking, he tries to work words like barrier and warrior and corridor into every sentence if he can because it sounds so good. Dare I say it: he exaggerates it a bit to prove his Scottishness? But oh: if only there was an R in independence, things could be so different.

Quick memory. 1996 or thereabouts. I’m standing in the old Daily Record building near the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow. Top floor: above the bridge, above the birds, above everything. The moment sticks in my mind because it’s one of the best views in the city – or was – and up on the roof, as high as you can go, is where acrophiliacs like me get our hits. Height is good. It feels good up here.

Don’t be angry with me. I know my knowledge of football is not great. I know it’s not my specialist subject. I know I’ve only ever done one sports-writing shift in my entire career and the editor never asked me back because I didn’t know what nutmegging was. But bear with me please, because I want to write about football today. In particular, I want to write about how me (Scottish) became an England football fan.

Has everything changed? The numbers say so: SNP down from 48 to 9. Labour up from 1 to 37. The headlines say so: “Keir Starmer wants new positive relationship with Scotland”. Even my feelings say so, yours too maybe. For years: anger, frustration, more anger. Now: relief, satisfaction. Hope?

This is weird. Labour has won, the Tories and the SNP have lost, and Liz Truss has been rightly punished for putting up my mortgage. So why don't I hear D:Ream telling me that things can only get, can only get better now I found you?

May the 22nd. Rishi Sunak, sans umbrella, announces the date of the election and John Swinney, all nice and dry indoors, says that calling it during the Scottish school holidays is an act of disrespect by the UK Government. He says the election planners won’t have given it a moment’s thought, and it demonstrates the contempt the Tories have for Scotland.

It sometimes feels like the only fact we know for sure in this election is that it’s happening on July 4th (with some of the people who heard it first allegedly heading straight for the bookies – kerching!) Everything else is contested. NHS waiting times are going up / going down. Migration numbers are higher / lower. Labour will tax you more / less. But at least we can rely on that venerable, old, trusted source of data, the census. Can’t we?

I’ve got quite the collection now. A letter from the Tories telling me the only option is the Tories, a letter from the SNP telling me the only option is the SNP, and a letter from Labour telling me the only option is Labour, and because I’m a good little voter I’m reading them all from start to finish. Then Keir Starmer says something and I think: oh, so it’s going to be like that is it?