Nothing makes me feel as Scottish as an English New Year’s Eve

I actually did read Tony Blair’s memoirs in 2010, despite having sworn on these pages, quite petulantly, that I would not.

I actually did read Tony Blair’s memoirs in 2010, despite having sworn on these pages, quite petulantly, that I would not. The bit that sticks in the mind is his description of Millennium Eve. You’ll have heard about it, because it’s already the only bit of the book that anybody seems to remember or ever mentions, because it’s funny, because he hated it. He’s in the Millennium Dome, every newspaper editor in the country is stuck on the tube at Stratford, he’s standing next to the Queen who doesn’t want to be there either, and he suddenly becomes convinced that one of the trapeze artists circling over their heads is going to fall down and kill her, thus severely harming his prospects of a second term. It’s a wonder Gordon Brown wasn’t up there with a craft knife, hacking away at the wires.

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Actually it isn’t, because Brown was in Scotland. Blair would have wanted to be there, too. All Scots wish to be in Scotland for Hogmanay. It’s in the DNA. If we aren’t there, we realise, we’ll end up doing something dismal, like drinking warm champagne with people we don’t even know, in some ghastly bit of Greenwich. I have spent three Hogmanays in England, which is at least two too many. Sentimental as it may sound, I approached each one with a sense of loss.

There are reasons for this. Of all the areas in which modern Scots excel (grinding economies into the dust, freeing terrorists, sectarianism, heart disease, cycling, biotech, mawkishness, literature about heroin, the manufacture of shortbread, etc) I’d say that Hogmanay is the one at which we excel the very most.