Why stay at home when you can miss it from afar?

THERE is a guilt pang, familiar to most of us, which can be triggered by matriarchs when they suggest we all do Christmas together as one big, happy family.

If that was not what you had in mind for your festive season you are struck by a sudden claustrophobia because families can smother; you are tongue-tied because family politics are a minefield; above all, you are conscience-stricken because they are your family.

This week, in her daily briefing, Nicola Sturgeon invited Scots to consider spending their 2020 summer holidays in their own country among their own people.

It was not what I had in mind for my break.

I had rather hoped that, towards the back end of the summer, I might jet off to Spain for a fortnight’s respite from the cabin fever which comes from being grounded at home in our fractious little country for much of the year.

I had rather thought that a little distance between myself and our wee bit hill and glen would be just the ticket for my mental disposition – and where better to decompress than my beloved Mallorca?

Where else but on a veranda at sunset, gazing, G&T in hand, across the shimmering mile of Med that separates the mainland from the island of Sa Dragonera is equilibrium truly to be found for this restless holidaymaker after those long months of lockdown?

Irritations

What more perfect way to shake off the irritations of over-familiarity with Scotland’s parochial bent than time spent in quiet contemplation of this slumbering firebreather represented in two miles of Iberian rock plonked in the azure sea?

Well, says Miss Sturgeon, Spain isn’t safe. Not yet, at least, and in any case, you’d be better staycationing in Scotland where, heaven knows, our tourist industry could use the action.

She is right, of course. One of the most helpful things we could do for our country’s economy right now is to limit our holidaying horizons and book in to one or more of the thousands of Scottish hotels and B&Bs currently staring at coronavirus-shaped holes in their business plans.

We have vistas right here to rival anything I could describe for you on the Iberian Peninsula – and a larder which, if I am honest, leaves paella and patatas bravas in the shade.

There is a North Coast 500 adventure which remains unchecked on my bucket list.

And there is, undoubtedly, much to be said at present for giving aircraft a wide berth.

All of which helps explain the bouts of guilt as the sense of urgency for getting the hell out of here intensifies.

Perhaps I should not be the only one feeling guilty.

On examining the reasons for this mounting desperation to get away, I conclude a share of the self-reproach should be shouldered by Miss Sturgeon and her party.

But, rather like the stereotypical family elders who cannot quite see that their own behaviour incentivises loved ones to do their own thing at Christmas, the SNP cannot quite see the ambivalence it engenders in patriots.

It doesn’t quite get that, to feel whole again, to regain a sense of perspective, we need to take some time out from our own land.

I have experienced these regular urges to be anywhere but here for the best part of a decade now – most acutely, perhaps, as we inexorably closed in on the 2014 independence referendum.

This was a time when ‘cancelculture’, as we have lately learned to call it, first gained currency, sweeping through our country like a virus.

‘Scotland, stay with us,’ said the late David Bowie in February that year and Nationalists cancelled him.

‘Don’t go. We love you,’ said comedian Eddie Izzard and his DVDs were binned.

Ignorant

It was a time when young Scots in particular were ostracised for failing to jump on the independence bandwagon.

‘What do you mean you’re voting No? A vote for the Union is a vote to privatise the NHS, you heartless b&@!*.’

So went typical conversations among schoolchildren who had been empowered at 16 with a vote yet were wilfully ignorant, swathes of them, of even the basics of devolution.

I had to take some time away in Mallorca.

The ensuing years were scarcely more edifying as every twist in the Westminster narrative brought more Scottish sound and fury, more grandstanding, more misrepresentation.

Who would not need time abroad when, back home, the SNP’s Westminster leader, wealthy Edinburgh investment banker Ian Blackford, was portraying himself as a humble Skye crofter?

When, day in day out in the Commons, the same man mendaciously portrayed his countryfolk as people with one voice, willing him on to speak for them?

Multiple sessions on Spanish verandas were necessary for me, I can tell you.

And so we come to the present time where, a few days ago, protesters waving saltires stationed themselves at the Border and brandished placards at incoming vehicles, advising their occupants to keep their infectious diseases in their own country.

This time their bigotry was cloaked in phony health concerns but, as usual, their language and visceral hatred for over-the-Border types gave the game away and the cloak did not even serve as a fig leaf.

As I write, SNP strategists are in a huddle over how best to trash Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s £800million rescue package for the Scottish economy, how most effectively to ram home the message that only separatists truly care.

In the last few minutes they have delivered their riposte to the Tories’ stamp duty challenge – decreeing the Land and Buildings Transaction Tax threshold should rise to £250,000, which is half of the sum at which stamp duty will now kick in down south.

It represents a bit of a Uturn from 24 hours earlier, when there were no Scottish plans to alter the tax – but it would never do to have the SNP cast as meanies in the hour of Tory benevolence.

And so the game goes on and it becomes ever more obvious that the skirmishes between devolved and central government are exactly that – a game played in service to political ends where the interests of the people come a distant second to one-upmanship.

Remain in lockdown in Scotland too long and the scales fall from the eyes.

Stagnant

Watch too many Covid-19 briefings by our First Minister, ever-polished, ever plausible, and the subtle drift into the realms of party political broadcast becomes, by the week, more manifest.

The problem I have with a staycation is no part of this country is quite far enough away from those who run it and the evidence of what they have done to it.

We are in every hostelry, every café or B&B dining room just one ill-advised tuppenceworth away from feeling we are not on holiday at all, that the air is not fresh in these parts but as stagnant as our national conversation.

A summer break in the Scotland I used to know would be swell. Would that Skye, for example, were still doable without calling to mind its humble resident crofter.

But I am afraid it takes regular gulps of overseas air to recognise the rightful status of Scotland’s local grievances in the scheme of things.

Yes, loving the old place these days really does require regular holidays from it.

I feel bad about that but so, First Minister, should you.