‘TAPS aff’ weather is a beautiful description for a hot day in Scotland requiring minimal clothing. If you were out amid the scorching sun yesterday you’ll know what I mean. It was glorious. But before sharing that story with you, I wanted to check if it was the same elsewhere in the country.

I typed "weather in Scotland" into Google – hoping for a national picture to appear. The result? “Glasgow, UK. Sunny. 21 degrees.” The second result? “BBC Weather – Glasgow.” The third? “BBC Weather – Edinburgh.” Other results, also telling me what the weather was in Glasgow, were further down. In the morning I heard on the radio – also from a Central Belt station – that there were “blue skies across the country”. It might well have been sunny everywhere. It’s just a harmless tale about the weather. As I’m ginger, I couldn’t even stay outside for that long anyway. Really this isn’t about the sun at all. It’s about what Google – and what many other sources focus on – when we want to tell a story about "Scotland".

Benedict Anderson coined the term “imagined communities” to describe the culture of nationalisms. It’s a description of how a society creates the idea of nationality among people we never meet and places we rarely see. Often this appears through stories and other media. We create mythology, heroes and villains, a plot line of history, and shared culture, even innocent wee phrases like "taps aff", as part of a unique culture that becomes a bedrock of what "Scotland" is as a place, and what makes it different from elsewhere.

There’s nothing wrong with imagining a community. In many ways – as civic nationalists argue – it can be a positive thing that brings strangers together through the idea of common endeavour. Yet I think there can often be shortcomings in the way those communities are created.

If rain and clouds had engulfed the Outer Hebrides yesterday it’s unlikely that we – the majority elsewhere – would have seen much of a change to the main news storyline of blazing sunshine. The problem with reality is that it’s often too varied to fit into a single story or a single conception of a national community. Why does this matter? Well, I think it offers a view of the Holyrood election – where thousands grab for a national story, when perhaps it was far too complex to be pigeon-holed. I watched the declarations in Glasgow, as old Labour seats tumbled in a repeat of 2015. Their chickens from the referendum were coming home to roost, it was fair to say. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh the story was different, as more affluent seats fell to Unionist parties. In Perthshire and the north-east the pattern shifted again – SNP lost ground directly to the Tories, while Orkney and Shetland were a world away from commentator expectations: the Liberals surged.

As a reader you’ll have your own views on these differences. From a Glasgow viewpoint, there’s a well kent story of the SNP’s growth and Labour’s decline – sometimes it’s presented (like Google’s weather report) as synonymous with Scotland as a whole. It certainly wasn’t in Edinburgh Southern or East Lothian.

We’ve also told a story of a Scotland where the Tories are toxic – and while that may be the case, relatively speaking, in much of the central belt, it isn’t in the seven constituencies they won outright last week. This isn’t just about the referendum, and it hasn’t appeared overnight. We speak as if there’s one Scotland – when that’s a complete fiction. There are rich enclaves; cut-off urban estates; vast tracts of rural land plotted with farms, crofts, and mansions; prosperous coastal towns; windswept old seaside resorts struggling as planes fly off to Spain; new build flats packed with overcharged international students; fishing communities; posh bistro restaurants bustling with financial executives. The truth is there are many different Scotlands.

Traditionally, it is the job of the media to bridge these differences: urban, rural, rich, poor, young, old. Increasingly, with a media bereft of money and time – reporters have to assume more while knowing less. Look carefully, for instance, at what lay-offs (often under the guise of "voluntary redundancies") do to the expertise of newsrooms. If we don’t have skilled professionals with the time to travel, research, and embed themselves within "Scotland’s communities", will we ever truly know the meaning of either?

The danger, and sadly the most likely outcome, is that electoral realities are used to reaffirm our own biases. The urban Tory vote is written off to British, orange nationalism. The rural swing from the SNP is too easily dismissed or assumed to be a straightforward constitutional backlash. Unionism in Edinburgh is simplified as tactical voting. Orkney and Shetland, and their independent voting patterns, remain otherworldly.

Perhaps the best and most challenging perspective to maintain is one of humility and doubt – to admit that there is no, and can be no, simple "national story" that can ever fully condense the political voices of millions. For those who try, we can at least take comfort in that what Hugh MacDiarmid called “our multiform, our infinite Scotland” remains as perplexing and fascinating as ever.