IT is May 1. Did you get up early to wash your face in the morning dew? It is a tradition that I always think fondly about but can only recall doing once with any real commitment, back in my student days, when a few of us stumbled bleary-eyed up Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh at dawn, adhering to the custom dating back centuries.
After puffing and panting our way towards the summit, slipping and sliding precariously in an array of inappropriate footwear, much hilarity then ensued as handfuls of icy cold water were scooped from the grassy slopes and splashed onto cheeks and foreheads.
Such larks. Well until, that is, someone spied a smattering of dog poo nearby and the probability of catching pink eye or some unsavoury zoonotic disease suddenly outweighed the chance of garnering a flawless complexion and good health for the year ahead (as the age-old superstition suggests).
Another May 1 found me atop a different Edinburgh prominence. On that occasion it was Calton Hill where I revelled in the heady spectacle of the annual Beltane Fire Festival – the ancient pagan celebration marking the arrival of summer – into the wee small hours.
As dawn broke, there was a frisson of excitement. A visit to the polling station – my first time being old enough to vote – beckoned that day. It was the 1997 General Election. Tony Blair and New Labour swept to power with a landslide majority, promising Things Can Only Get Better.
It's hard to believe it was 25 years ago now. A quarter of a century. Gone in the blink of an eye. Yet, the soaring wave of optimism that gripped large swathes of the country remains as sharp in my memory as if it were yesterday.
In my 25 years as a voter, there has been myriad disappointments and disillusionment. Be it Blair and his subsequent role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Or Nick Clegg cashing in his idealist principles to hitch himself to David Cameron's wagon and forge the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010.
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Few of us will forget the seismic watershed of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, nor how it was mired by entrenched viewpoints and festering resentment on both sides of the divide. Next came the colossal fallout of the 2016 EU Referendum and the quagmire of Brexit.
Recent years have felt like a Groundhog Day-esque blur of schlepping to polling stations and putting crosses (or occasionally numbers) into little boxes as your weary soul leaks vim and vigour like a slow puncture on a bicycle tyre.
Many of us can relate to the famously beleaguered Brenda from Bristol who, when vox-popped by a BBC reporter after the snap general election was called in 2017, gave a howl of incredulous disbelief as she exclaimed: "You're joking – not another one!"
Fellow columnist Neil Mackay wrote in The Herald in recent days: "Politics has now descended into a hell-scape peopled by extremists, predators, nutcases, trolls and halfwits."
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He's not far wrong. Still, as Scotland prepares to go to the polls in the local elections this week, there is one cheering prospect: the delightful voting day tradition of photographing dogs at polling stations.
On Thursday, let's do our civic duty and then flood social media with pictures of four-legged, furry bundles of joy. Job's a good 'un.
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