I THINK I know what Alex Salmond meant when he told the New Statesman magazine in the summer of 2013 that he had “a British part” to his identity. Only a hermit could remain impervious to the influence that the British state and all of its paraphernalia wields every day of our lives.

It weaves itself, often untraced, into all aspects of our Scottish existences, even when you think you have developed a sophisticated filter system for the purposes of being as independent from its apparatus as it’s possible to be in our current constitutional arrangements.

Indeed, I would go a step further than Mr Salmond and say that there is a large English part to my identity. To me, to consider yourself “British” would be not to possess much of an identity at all. Events of the last few weeks, both happy and sad, have made me reflect on my “Englishness”, or rather the extent to which the ways of our great southern neighbour have insinuated themselves into my being.

I suppose it all started with a chap called Lemmy, or Ian Fraser Kilmister, who died of cancer three days after Christmas. Lemmy was the founder and lead singer of the rock band Motorhead who, on two separate occasions in Glasgow in the early 1980s, made me feel good to be alive more profoundly than ever could the most spiritual church service or witnessing your team’s winning goal in an Old Firm match (okay, perhaps an exaggeration there).

Perhaps you aren’t acquainted with the musical genre known as heavy rock, but if you are you will know that most of its greatest exponents, such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Motorhead, are all English. These chaps could get their heads down and batter the bejesus out of their drums and guitars – the way that God had really intended them to be played. They seemed to be beholden to no earthly authority.

Although Scotland had a few decent proper rockers we tended to favour much more fey and introspective guitar bands of the Belle and Sebastian, Orange Juice and Associates type. I quite liked these bands too, but their answers to life’s vicissitudes seemed to be to accept them meekly and write poetry about them.

Motorhead and their ilk, on the other hand, seemed to me to display a preference for wrecking the place in the teeth of injustice. I feel sure that if they had been Scottish they would have voted Yes in 2014 and I’m equally sure that, although I came late to the idea of independence being the only way forward for Scotland, nascent feelings of nationhood were being subliminally nurtured by Lemmy and his rocking confreres.

In honour of Lemmy’s death my brother Damian and I raised a few Bacardis to him over the Christmas period and prayed that Jesus was a fan of the idiom, too, and might thus grant him a degree of leeway in some of the Ten Commandments.

Of course, we know that David Bowie, for all that he spent his career challenging embedded uniformity and liberating many of us from fear of difference and change, nevertheless came out for Better Together during the referendum campaign. I forgave him this, though, because he did it so sweetly and, it seemed to me, from a genuine affection for Scotland. His wish for Scotland to remain in the Union wasn’t characterised by the faux affection and condescension of that shower of business and media attention-seekers led by the likes of Ben Fogle and Dan Snow, who asked us to please stay in the UK a month or so before the date of the independence referendum.

I could never consider myself Mr Bowie’s number one fan but, even so, I was occasionally enchanted by his music and I was sad at his death a few weeks after Lemmy’s departure. Then we received the news last week that another wonderful and iconic English figure from the entertainment world, Alan Rickman, had died. Rickman’s death left me curiously sad, certainly much more so than I would previously have thought. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that I felt I knew something of him in his many fine stage and screen performances. Though I never met him I would have expected him, if I had, to have been a warm and humane person.

So it’s been a very English month and one in which, on several occasions, I have stopped to think about all the things I like about England and the English people who have given me friendship over the years. I also remembered being present at another Alex Salmond moment, this time on the Black Isle three years ago, when he was opening a new North Sea technology facility. On this occasion, our then First Minister said that Scotland was part of six unions with the rest of the UK and that it was only the political one which deemed Westminster as the sovereign parliament that required alteration. He stated that our two countries were bound together by other ties, too, such as currency, monarchy, society, Europe and defence.

“We will embrace those other unions while using the powers of independence to renew and improve them. The idea that these ties are dependent on a parliament in London are, and have always been, totally nonsensical,” he said.

I spent the last few days of last week slaking my Anglophilia, wrapped up in England’s thrilling Test series victory over the world’s number one cricket side, South Africa.

Curiously, my appreciation of England, its people and its ways has probably done more than anything else to reinforce my conviction that Scotland can only ever be all that it can be by being in charge of its own destiny. I want Scotland to stand alongside this great nation beyond our southern borders; not a few steps below it.