LOYALTY, IDENTITY AND BELONGING It is a beautiful morning in Lochearnhead. I walk round the garden, look over Loch Earn to Ben Vorlich, turn to look north up the awesome Glen Ogle, then east to the Glen Ogle burn and the bridge that takes the road to St Fillans, Comrie and Crieff. To the west is the village. It is hard not to feel intensely patriotic with views like these. I am lucky. It is a far cry from the City of London, where I worked for 27 years.My first office was by Moorgate, overlooking the splendid green glade that was Finsbury Circus. Later was to come Fleet Street and Canary Wharf. Where I am now is further still from Wales where I got my training as a newspaperman in the Merthyr and Rhondda valleys.. My past life seems remote. And I never dreamt it would lead me here. I have never yearned to return to the places of my past.But I have never regretted them, either, or wished that past to be different. That past outside of Scotland was never strange or alien. And there were many things about living down south that I enjoyed, and about life in England that I admired. I feel I have been lucky to live in many countries, yet all the time in one country.This freedom never once denied me those proud feelings of being a Scot. I did not feel cheated, or neglected or inferior or done down, other than what my own mistakes and shortcomings rightly visited on me. So I find this independence referendum very difficult.Its evocation of history is nothing other than stirring. And the hope it has fired has roused our aspiration. But like many, I feel I am being asked to choose between one identity and another, one part of me and another, one life and another and I feel uncomfortable with that. I would not swap what I have now for the past, but nor do I look back on the past with misgiving or regret or any sense that my identity and sense of belonging was being repressed or denied. We have had a big country to live in, and a right to roam and move about its constituent parts with no papers to fill, no formalities to complete and no currency to change. And I confess to having enjoyed the duplicity of being at home and abroad at the same time: across this one country the variation in manner and outlook and attitude, the infinite minutiae of difference. Here in Scotland, nothing would make me change what I have or diminish my sense of identity and belonging. See where I sit here and admire.But that identity and belonging also adheres to that larger country with its many identities and the ease of movement between them. And I do not want to be a foreigner to myself.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 11:00:02 +0000
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