IT is high time for some important issues regarding the future of Scotland to be settled. You will have noticed how advocates on both sides of the various arguments – independence, Brexit, whether Dundee and Dundee United ought to merge, just as Sainsbury’s and Asda are planning to do – remain bafflingly silent on certain key topics, no matter how often they clamber on their soapboxes and try to soft-soap us.

For example, would an independent Scotland confer its own knighthoods? (“Arise, Sir David of Dundee...”) Will border patrols be set up to prevent fleeing felons from seeking asylum down south? Is there a plan to issue travelling salesmen with letters of transit like the ones that caused so much trouble in Casablanca? In short, are we looking at new traditions, or extraditions?

Should the Land o’ Cakes impose import duty on French gateaux? Irish Stew? Welsh rarebit? What about Leicester cheese or Barnsley chops? Might our airports sprout separate queuing facilities at Arrivals, to segregate the Natives from the Others? And I suppose an English Embassy would be located in Edinburgh, would it, in Morningside perhaps?

I can still remember my parents being credited with the full value minus a penny when they paid with a Scottish pound note in Blackpool in 1956 and it is tempting to wonder whether English pound coins would be welcome in all outlets post-independence. Not too long ago a barmaid in London refused the Clydesdale £20 note I offered, with some nonsense about her local Post Office not accepting Scottish money for safekeeping as part of the day’s takings. Pull the other one, I felt like saying, but she already had. Maybe we can look forward to some new faces on our banknotes to replace Dickens and Darwin (who claimed only the fittest survive). I would like to make it known that my head is available for most denominations.

And then there is the vexed question of mixed marriages. Would suntanned spouses from the hop fields of Kent still have the right of abode once their domestic bliss wilted under the weight of Scottish weather? (In Scotland every silver lining has a cloud.) Would the children of such marriages be entitled to dual citizenship, permitted to claim both Burns and Shakespeare as their national Bards?

The naysayers and scaremongers are keen to paint a picture of economic stagnation if Scotland goes it alone post Brexit, seeming to suggest we might become like France in August, with nothing open for business. To listen to them, we could all end up as stony-broke as a broken stone after a bad fall and awaken with a Brexit hangover – a Bangover – asking ourselves, “Why are we here?” and “How did we get here?” – the sort of things people say to minicab drivers when they have passed out in the back seat on the way home.

There are some new pieces of legislation I would welcome from a change of direction. The TV watershed, for example, could be made an hour earlier for oldies, so that we could discover who did the gruesome crime before we nod off. And perhaps we might return to the Dundee Solution to solve intractable problems – in the event of a dead heat for our Lord Provost, cards are cut.

How will it all turn out, I wonder? And will we all be any wiser after the event? Should I have kept that seebackroscope I got free with The Wizard all those years ago? As a man who has never nailed his colours to any mast, I guess I’ll just sink or swim with Scotland as usual. Although if pressed to come down on one side or the other, I would probably say I think these things can always go either way. Remember, you heard it here first.

David Aitken
Broughty Ferry, Dundee