I’M toasting up to a healthy puce. My rickets is abating. Ladies and gentlemen: it is lobster season in bonny Scotland. Taps aff: the sun is shining.

We may not all be walking on sunshine, but most of the country took a great gulp of free air this week. After a claggy springtime loomed over by slate skies, the troglodyte seasons are over. The clouds have broken like mercy. The long winter’s store of stoor and cobwebs have been bundled away. The windows are open. The houses are breathing. The green sap is – finally – rising.

And watching the cheery hubbub on the terraces this week, the clink of glasses and the blether of conversation and laughter, you could feel the palpable easing of tensions, as this drop of sun helped our tight-coiled December moods unwind.

The Mediterranean native can’t begin to understand the collective glee folk at our latitude feel to see their cities painted in bright colours against blue skies. After months of holding your breath, it feels like a collective sigh of relief.

But against the backdrop of this sunny vista – our politics is waxing more and cantankerous. And like the missing sun, this week I’ve come to realise I’ve been missing a little sunshine in my politics too.

In these pages last Friday, I sang the praises of Glasgow Central MP, Alison Thewliss. A politician, I suggested, of quiet purpose and serious endeavour; someone to be proud of. Alison had the good grace to be mortified by these friendly words – but there was something else nourishing about your response to the piece.

My dear mother – always a reliable critic – observed “how nice you’ve written something positive for a change”. It was a deft twist of the knife. Ma Tickell wasn’t wrong.

As a liberal Scottish nationalist writing about British politics, it is all too easy to be slurped into a vortex of negativity by the state of things, and to become a relentlessly negative man, with much to be negative about.

In politics, anger is one of those irregular verbs. He’s lost the place, you’ve got the fury, and I have legitimate concerns. Scots can be emotional oysters, but anger seems the universally recognised exception to our collective devotion to clamming up.

The perennially angry man – and the tepid soul without a flint to strike in them – both seem like poor specimens of humanity.

But it did make me wonder if under the clouds of Brexit, we’ve lost the knack of sunshine politics.

I can’t be alone in finding the perma-rage which now characterises British public life exhausting – but the perma-raged seem to struggle to empathise with those parts of the population whose nerves don’t all end in blue touch papers.

Ten years on, it is easy to forget the genesis of the SNP’s success in 2007. But part of it was sunshine politics. The backdrop wasn’t universally benign. Within a year and a half of taking office, the banking crash rolled through Northern Rock’s books, exposing the Royal Bank of Scotland’s unbalanced balance sheet to devastating effect.

True, the party benefited from an ailing Labour-led executive in Edinburgh. It benefited from the palpable sense of exhaustion with and within the old regime.

It benefited from an SNP contingent in Holyrood with breadth and depth. But Salmond and Sturgeon seasoned the whole campaign with optimism. “It’s time,” they said. Independence wasn’t the only golden city on the hill. Devolved government was a rich seam of unexploited possibility. Time to get above ourselves. Time to do better.

Circumstances change. To reprise one of David Cameron’s better gags, the challenge for any incumbent government is that they “were the future once”. It isn’t so easy to be hopey-changey from the back of a ministerial car. Incumbents – necessarily – must appeal to different political virtues than their opponents. But tonally, I find myself wondering if the SNP wouldn’t benefit from a little more application of that old sunshine.

Don’t get me wrong. Brexit is a monument to all you can achieve through the application of negative politics. Underestimate its dark power at your peril. The Foreign Secretary and his phalanx of Tory poppycockers can burble away about Brexit as an exercise in political optimism – but you can make out the knowing twinkle in either eye. This hokum isn’t even self-deceiving. Its proponents know it is malarkey.

And ours is an angry time. Mr Trump is the herniated scrotum-in-chief. Angry voices are endlessly amplified, and are endlessly multiplying. Anger sells. And in this sense, I’m almost certainly a man out of his time. Anger isn’t an emotion I particularly relish. It isn’t an emotion I trust.

The late Pierre Trudeau took “reason before passion” for his personal motto. I wouldn’t go that far, but it seems to me that a wise person’s thoughts ought to spy on one another. You shouldn’t give your inner demonettes uncritical reign.

A few years ago I met a Scottish politician, who will remain nameless and partyless to protect the innocent. His phizog had flashed across the telly from time to time and I’d heard odds and sods of his speeches in Parliament – but nothing particularly memorable. But from these scattered clips, a clear picture of this politician emerged.

For all the world to see, he was a pop-eyed, blood-drenched partisan. And to be fair to him, he put in a decent turn in the role. The jabby finger was always heartfelt, the conniptions profound. The wrathful eye always bulged and flashed convincingly.

But when we met, these perceptions were all disappointed. Imagine my surprise, to encounter a mild, thoughtful person with sensitive fingertips for political nuance and an open mind.

I thought better of this soul – much better – having met him than having seen him on telly. But the encounter was also a depressing commentary on how budding politicians feel they ought to behave.

Whether through the dark wizardry of spin doctors – or the anxiety of working out a version of yourself which you’re prepared to shove above the parapet – this palpable decent, thoughtful fellow turned none of these faces to the general public. He assumed – or someone assumed – they’d prefer the radgier version.

Political commentary in this country is often powerfully negative – and there’s a place for that. There’s often an urgent moral necessity for it. But with the sun on the green – the furious negativity of Scottish politics feels taking a last drag on the root of an old cigar. After a long winter, perhaps it could do with a little sunshine too.