Peter McKay’s diary: Is Kate and William’s Scottish trip a pro-union initiative?

Having dampened local republican ardour during their recent tour of New Zealand and Australia, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visit thinking-about-breaking-away Scotland next week. They’ll tour Glenturret Distillery near Crieff, Perthshire, next Thursday, to ‘bottle their own Glenturret whisky’, if you please. Sounds like a pro-union royal initiative, but what will First Minister Alex Salmond have to say? He claims he’d like the Queen to continue as Scotland’s head of state, although some of his supporters disagree. When HM said in her letter to the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly last week that she prays everyone ‘will work together for the social good of Scotland’, whatever the outcome of the referendum, Salmond’s response was unctuous, praising her ‘typically gracious and considered remarks’. The oily devil. By the way, the Middleton Ancient tartan — predominantly orange and green — is very nice. Will Kate give it an outing?

I was honoured to be invited to an unusual event on Saturday: a dinner dance in the Glenlivet distillery, billed as ‘An Evening For George’. A magnificent feast, preceded by refreshments from a ‘whisky fountain’, this memorial event was to honour the late Speyside whisky expert George Hook, whose informal symposiums I was privileged to attend occasionally in the Ghillies Bar of the Gordon Arms Hotel, Fochabers, Moray. A man of giant stature and forceful opinions, George was memorialised fittingly by around 100 friends who missed him in the presence of his widow, Alison. Young lawyer Louise Duncan sang the evening to a close around midnight with her sweet-sad rendition of Scotland’s moving unofficial anthem, ‘Caledonia’. Having lived most of my life in England, I again regretted the lack of a decent national dance, or song, south of the border. Is it Scotland’s innocent chauvinism (in its original sense) that fuels dreams of separation?