WE surely don’t have long to wait until the Edinburgh festivals add another cultural jamboree to their sprawling roster. Nine separate festivals currently fight for space in August, but there always seems to be room for just one more. This small city seems curiously eager to sacrifice a little more of its identity each year to the preferences and whims of a travelling circus.

This month we seem to be seeing the emergence of another fiesta: the Nicola Sturgeon Festival. Hardly a day has passed without pictures of Scotland’s First Minister sharing stages with assorted media types at a bewildering rate. Ms Sturgeon has faced criticism for being absent during Edinburgh’s cleansing workers’ strike.

Such censure though, is not strictly fair. There can’t be a person left in Scotland who doesn’t know where Ms Sturgeon can be reached if there was ever an emergency requiring her attention. Just head for the Book Festival or tune in via social media. Most of the venues seem to be quite good at passing on messages.

Not that this is ever likely to happen, you understand. Our First Minister and her WhatsApp cabinet specialise in ways of hanging anything serious around the necks of Westminster.

Ms Sturgeon last week voiced concerns about the rhetoric emerging from the Tory leadership contest that seemed to indicate an appetite for reversing devolution. Yet, so often does her government blame Westminster for whatever ails Scotland that you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re not really devolved at all.

The First Minister has added a few more dates to her August tour this year. And she always provides good value for money for the venues she favours. There’s always at least one line designed for the 24-hour churn of breaking news. This week provided two at the same sitting under gentle probing by the kenspeckle sportswriter, Graham Spiers.

During this, she chided some in the wider independence movement for the unsporting language and delinquent bunting they deployed during the Tory leadership hustings in Perth earlier in the week. She suggested that some of them would probably have accused her of being a “traitor”. Later, she revealed that she felt both British and Scottish, as part of a complex identity rooted in being brought up in the British Isles.

The underlying message in both these interventions was clear: that these extremist fringe elements would probably recoil at the concept of self-identifying as British. And that to hold such a position was in itself unreasonable.

We’ll leave aside for the moment that much of the unpleasantness and intimidation that exists within her own party has come from a toxic group of her most loyal party lickspittles and aimed at women defending their sex-based rights. And that she stands accused of helping orchestrate this.

“This might surprise people, but do you know I consider myself British as well as Scottish,” she said. “British is an identity that comes from being part of the British Isles. We’ll still be part of the British Isles. An independent Scotland would still be part of the British–Irish Council that I go to right now as First Minister.

“Identity is a complex thing. Many people live in Scotland, are as Scottish as I am, but will have a very proud Pakistani or Indian or African identity.”

Ms Sturgeon will know from her close ties with the Republic that very few Irish citizens identify as having a dual Irish-British identity. Belonging to the British-Irish Council is largely a matter of geographical necessity and mutual cooperation.

She must also know that the overwhelming majority of Yes supporters would reject the notion of having British identity and that this doesn’t signify small-mindedness or anything more malevolent. Like Ireland, Scotland has a group of identifying cultural, political, historical and religious characteristics that inform a unique sense of nationhood.

Ms Sturgeon’s predecessor and long-time mentor Alex Salmond put it far more eloquently nine years ago with his nuanced analysis of the five unions which would bind Scotland to the rest of the UK after independence.

Mr Salmond, speaking at an event in Cromarty Firth in Easter Ross said that Scotland potentially would remain part of five unions: the European Union; the NATO defence union; sterling; the monarchy and the “social union” between the people of the UK.

It was a far more nuanced statement on an independent Scotland’s shared interests with the rest of the United Kingdom following independence. It fell a long way short of claiming dual Scottish-British identity. And how could it be otherwise? For, what would be the point of advocating for full Scottish independence if the leader of that movement claimed a shared identity with a sovereign realm she’d spent most of her adult life seeking to leave?

It’s difficult to understand what Ms Sturgeon was seeking to achieve with her expression of dual Scottish and British nationality, the primary motivation of those in Scotland who desire to remain within the United Kingdom.

A mature and confident Yes movement will always acknowledge and even value Scotland’s shared heritage with England which is reinforced with family and work connections. This doesn’t imply a sense of Britishness.

I’ve just spent this week in London, my favourite other city, visiting friends. The east London neighbourhood in which I’m staying is a vibrant and joyous melting-pot of cultures and languages that span all five continents.

Perhaps, having been here for several generations, some of these residents may choose to identify partly as British. Others would reject the dual-nationhood idea. They would point to the fact that it was only economic necessity caused by geo-political upheaval occasioned by Britain’s wars of adventure that transported them here. No matter; they are here now and they contribute to London’s intoxicating cultural and ethnic churn.

Alongside them there are around one million Scots living in England, while 450,000 English people live and work in Scotland. It’s in our shared interactions that we respect and value each other’s identity and nationhood.

It seems strange that the leader of a movement built on a uniquely Scottish identity, after 23 years of rewarding employment stemming from this, would choose this moment to talk up her Britishness. Others more cynical than me might conclude that a CV requires to be upgraded.