The shocking, secret truth about Scotland’s independence debate: it is civilised.

BREAKING: The night is dark and full of nutters. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been writing on the internet for nearly a decade now that this neither astonishes nor appals me. After enough time has passed you begin to appreciate that it doesn’t matter. Not really. You learn to ignore the howling.

Sure, it makes for good copy and there’s hardly a hack or a blogger who hasn’t peered beneath the line and despaired of humanity. It’s a swamp, right enough. Sometimes, too, you wonder where all these bampots and zoomers live. Nowhere near you, you hope. But the chances are that some of them do.

It sometimes takes an effort to remember that the fury chimps represent nothing more than their own tiny selves. You comfort yourself with the thought that though they may be like us they are not us. Since they seem to be everywhere it is easy to forget they are not so numerous as they seem.