PAUL MALIK POLITICAL EDITOR

Full disclosure: at the last independence referendum, I was a civilian. As in, I was not a journalist.

I worked in a supermarket callcentre in Dundee during the run-up and day of the independence vote.

The majority of the inbound calls came from outwith Scotland, asking where their washing machines were (on the back of a truck), how many rowing machines they could get for 10,000 points (quite a few, it turned out) and what my – and therefore my billion pound employer – thought of Scotland becoming independent.

In what I hope is not symbolic of the career I have now, I pretended not to have the foggiest about politics, told the customer their washer-dryer would not be long in arriving (if you didn’t consider two to three working weeks a long time) and wished them well. We were prohibited, of course, from telling customers how an inanimate plc was going to vote.

But who, in Scotland in 2014, could convince anyone they didn’t have an opinion on politics.

Everywhere you went – taxis, bakers, hairdressers, call-centre break rooms – you could not escape the discourse. People wanted to know how you were going to vote, and why in turn you were wrong.

Five years is a long time, and again no time at all. It can pass in the blink of an eye and at the same time bookend an epoch – especially in the digital age. For a 16-year-old now allowed to take part in Scottish politics, it is almost a third of their life.

There seems to be no let-up in the discussion. Perhaps the country is doomed to have a near 50-50 split in every binary vote it ever takes – a punishment for choosing a yay-or-nay answer to determine complex, ageold constitutional arrangements.

Feeling like the one who missed out, the Monday after the vote I started the first day of my journalism course – definitively told by my lecturers writing about the constitutional question was not a good use of time, that by graduation the country would have moved on. Some of our most intelligent thinkers, analysts and columnists have got it wrong. Without truly definitive answers, it is safe to say big political questions will not just “go away” – as evidenced with that other fun one, Brexit. Pandora’s Box has opened and the lid is long gone.

This decade we have been invited to take part in 12 important votes – from the AV referendum to general elections – and most likely there will be another two added by 2020.

Five years to some is quick while others consider it a generation – my only fear is in the next half-decade we get fatigued of it all and stop turning up. Nothing good ever comes of that.