I PASSED my driving test long before sat-nav and Google were on the go and I've always been good at geography so I know my way around a road map.

When planning a journey, they provide a starting point, places of interest along the way and, most importantly, a destination.

It’s all there in front of you, perfectly drawn by cartographers and they have been used for centuries by travellers on land and at sea.

But then along came Nicola Sturgeon and rewrote all the rules of map making when she “revealed” her routemap out of lockdown to a weary population.

There was no destination, no starting point and nothing to see along the way except for your own four walls.

In fact, she performed a bit of a miracle by producing a map that offers nothing but a nine-week long journey back to where we were 7 months before.

There was no actual map at all, just a blank piece of paper dotted randomly with vague ideas. Like a dot-to dot book, but without the dots.

Put simply, we are all in lockdown until April 26 at the earliest and then we are put back into the hated levels system that failed to work the first time round.

Despite the vast majority of council areas already having case numbers that justify putting them in Level 2 now, while others are close to or below Level 1, every area will instead likely start at Level 3.

Scotland has the lowest case numbers in the UK, the R rate of infections has been below 1 for a full three weeks and the daily positivity rates are hovering around the WHO recommended figure of 5 per cent, which means the pandemic is under control.

But yet, a full nine weeks from now, the vast majority of us will still be living under severe restrictions while the rest of the UK and Europe will probably have much more freedom.

The First Minister claims that caution is required to avoid another lockdown next winter. But she has also promised that every adult will be vaccinated by the end of July and only a week ago hailed the “heroic” efforts of vaccinators to get this far.

Therefore, if the vaccination roll-out is not the magic bullet to get us back to normal then what is the point in it? 

Ms Sturgeon now has two crucial questions that must be answered as a matter of urgency.

How low do cases have to be before it is safe to open everything up again and how many in the population need to be vaccinated before we can return to normal?

It is suspected that the government is chasing the impossible dream of eradicating Covid altogether, which will take years, if ever at all.

If the goal is eradication, like several of her advisers have hinted at, then they must be reined in for the sake of the economy.

Under-24s make up 60% of all the new unemployed, risking an entire generation being thrown on the scrapheap. Senior school pupils are also at risk of going the same way due to the disruption in their academic work.

Nicola Sturgeon had a golden opportunity to set out a proper road map that truly reflected the reality of the situation in Scotland and give the population a boost by revealing dates to lift their spirits and get allow battered businesses the chance to plan ahead. 

Instead, she left the situation confused and gave out the impression that Scotland may not be open for business in the crucial summer period when other parts of the UK and Europe will be.         

We simply have to learn to live with a virus that isn’t going away. Scotland’s people must not be allowed to be used as some sort of public health social experiment.