IT’S near Year End, so I’d better confess. During the Covid months I haven’t made (baked?) banana loaf/cake. Nor did I learn a foreign language – and as for mastering a musical instrument, forget it. But I did get through a decent pair of trainers as I discovered the nooks and crannies around the Drumbrae.

Thickets of trees masquerading as small woods, grassy knolls pretending to be meadows complete with blooming wild flowers. OK, some of them could have been rampant weeds. And like elsewhere, it was obvious that Mother Nature had thrown out the rules for the city. Foxes spotted earlier and earlier in the evenings, pigeons strutting their stuff on empty roads and who knew there were rabbits around? But they didn’t have it all their own way. I disturbed birds and a few cats as I broke the evening silence, banging pots and pans for the key workers.

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But with grandkids home schooling, no marches, no Edinwfi monthly meetings, I’ve learnt how to work Zoom and Microsoft Teams: other platforms are available. I’ve attended energising events, book festivals, Yes meetings, but also I’ve had the life sucked out of me at gatherings as some folks droned on and on and on.

Good job you can go mute and switch off the visuals! I’ve discovered how well it does go when you observe virtual meeting etiquette. How you learn, exchange, and build up networks and relationships!

So I do hope this holds me in good stead for 2021. You don’t need to be a Nostradamus to predict the rollercoaster, health, social, political. And we’ve just had just a taste with lorries stuck outside Dover: no infrastructure, no water, no food, no toilets or showers, a given just in case that oven-ready deal was found to be a tad underdone?

With Covid, surely there would be a rapid health response, world-beating perhaps, that could accommodate lorry drivers for test and vaccinate to facilitate traffic movement. I mean we need to keep trade moving: goods in, goods out. We don’t want to see empty shelves, fresh produce in decline, supermarkets beginning to impose rationing. Oh wait! And all that Scottish produce going to waste in the queues? A push if ever needed for Scottish sea ports and air ports geared up for freight, like small indy countries across the globe.

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Matt Hancock admitted in December on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that Covid is “out of control”. A strain emanating from the English south has been recorded in various countries and continents. Some export achievement that!

With Covid figures rising, and news of a temporary mortuary opening in Lincolnshire, it is obvious England is not a nation being governed and led well. It is a nation tottering at the abyss.

I wish no ill will to the people of rUK. But this is the time to forge our future away from the remains of Union as we move towards the end game. Pro-Unionists are ratcheting up their opposition to a referendum with more and more desperate measures, like calling for the May 2021 elections to be cancelled. That cannot be allowed to happen. We have to be prepared to challenge with whatever legal means there are available to us. And the grassroots has to continue in readiness to organise, mobilise and campaign as hard as we did in 2014.

My thanks, then, to all at The National for their continued actions in the indy fight, along with my wish for 2021: that Scotland unites against Tory actions with their “vision” for the future of the “Union”, and that Labour’s recycling of federalism in any form – with one MP here and no hopes of overturning the Tory majority – is defeated again at the 2021 ballot box.

That 2021 is the year the shackles are removed.

Selma Rahman
Edinburgh