The Scottish Vote
Bob Stark

For the "No" side.

"For the people of Scotland to walk away now would be like painstakingly building a home and then walking out and throwing away the keys. So I would say to everyone who is voting on Thursday, please remember ... this isn't any old country. This is the United Kingdom. This is our country and you know what truly makes us great, it is not our economic might or military prowess, it's our values, British values, fairness, freedom, justice." David Cameron UK Prime Minister

For the "Yes" side.

“Fuckin failures in a country of failures. Its nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah, don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant healthy society to be colonised by. No ... we are ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wis the shite thev got. Ah hate the Scots.” Irvine Welsh, "Trainspotting"

Now, for my side.

I'll have to put my genetic material on the table.

My father's parents were Scottish. Their original ancestral home, tracked back through the bleeding centuries, is within Clan Robertson. Indeed, as I may have related before, the first of the male Stark historical paternal line to cock his balls from under his wee kilt and begot a mini-tribe of snot-nosed wankers was a fellow known as 'Duncan the Fat'.  Ergo, it came to be, that my dear ole Daddy contributed my Y chromosome. I figure then that half of me is fully Scot.

On my mother's side, her dear sweet maternal unit came down the Potato Famine Irish line, while Grand Daddy Butler was an inheritor of English blood. What mix then, which X chromosomal material I got tagged with is an open question. Given my propensity for Celtic music, as opposed to the overly earnest traditional English Folk music belted out in local pubs, closed at 11:00 am, just when the funs' beginning, and, given my assured preference for Irish Whiskey over British Bitters, I'm thinking I may have quite a large Green Isle-induced genetic substance to my existence. I cannot, fee-fi-fo-fum, smell the blood of an Englishman.

Well, any society that has to stop every day for 4 o'clock tea and scones and serves fish and chips wrapped in newspaper is a culture that is extremely elitist and dangerous to one's health. The only time I might feel English is when I watch Monty Python's “Holy Grail.”

After stealing lands as well as the rightful crown from Scottish heads, which somehow kept dropping into buckets, locking the crown jewels, golden spectre or blessed highland female furs in the Tower, the English have pretty much ruled Britannia.

What a pile of wank.

David Cameron spews out, "fairness, freedom, justice". Tell that to the Arabs after World War 1, the people of India, and both the Jews and the Arabs in the Middle East circa 1948. The greatest myth, the last one attached to the sinking empirical sun, is that the Brits gave the world education, justice and “The Spice Girls.” It’s bloody arrogance and deception, okay, maybe not “The Spice Girls.” The English have always needed a dose of humility shoved up their collective arse.

Like 'American Exceptionalism', these misguided ideals of grandeur seem to evolve, not as the nation state arose, but when it is on the way down and out, and mostly when needed to arouse the troops to go on yet one more missionary mission to save the fucking world. Empires fail from within, as their myths become albatrosses, turn monster, then turn against them.

Surely, the British Justice System is more humane than a sword severing a head in a Syrian desert but no better than many other society's legal systems.  Surely the British Education System, with its grand tradition of debating society's and parliamentary rules trumps one-minded, narrow-minded Muslim religious fanatics whom would have us ruled by their literal interpretation of their religious bible. Alas, the grand British system also has deep roots in child abuse. Surely, the English have their publicly-funded health system, but are also as free to live in poverty as any other nation's people, based on an equally distasteful caste system; tinged, cleansed, with the mythical carrot that, even if you're a poor alley cat living in the northern chunks of England you can still rise to become Lord this or Lord that, and sniff brandy with the best of them. Bollocks!

Has Cameron lost his marbles.

If the Scots vote 'aye, I'd like to have a go of it on me own ta very much', holy fucking hell is going to break out! The banks will leave, along with, hopefully, the nuclear subs; the economy will collapse; Europe will be weaker and Putin will be even more transient in his territorial wanderings and on and on it bleeding well goes.

The Yanks got along quite well, for a while anyways, after they dumped all that British tea in Boston Harbour. So will the Scots, even though times will be a bit prickly at first. Aye, these are Scots! Lord love a bloody sheep they invented the world, didn't they?

They're not trying to throw away the keys to the house, they just want their own set to a house they help build, so they can move out of the basement and maybe play a little golf on the lawn on Sundays.

In the end, as the vote looms, my own personal take on it is that the 'No' side will win by the slimmest of margins but if their southern masters don't enact their "Vow" to hand-over a few more political goodies to their now, new found best friends and family members, the shite will really hit the fan.

Of course, if the "Yes" side wins the day, and blows it, 'Rent Boy" from Trainspotting will be hitting the heroin again.

I might as well be a Viking.

Meanwhile, no matter the outcome, I'll be left to ponder with whom Duncan the Fat shared his chromosomal material. I might be a freakin' Viking!