I’ve not had much energy for blogging over the past couple of days. The weather for the past three days has been incredibly bad. Far too hot and humid. Especially sitting here at the computer, which is at the top of the house, but in the middle, with no windows. It feels like all the water is being sucked out of me here.

Looks like it’s going to be much the same for the next five days as well.

Scotland is meant to be a cool place. Why can’t it be?

Glasgow claims to be Scotland’s friendliest city but a closer examination reveals that usually means a one-sided conversation at a bus stop leading to a plea for 20p.

–Stephen Jardine in the Edinburgh Evening News (via Newsblog).

My mother comes from Glasgow and claims it’s a really friendly place. I don’t believe her. The last time we went to Glasgow, some person who was about forty yards away shouted — rather rudely, in my opinion — at us, “Oi!, whatssa time?”

I thought the person could at least have walked up to ask, or said “excuse me” or something, instead of shouting and saying “oi”. But my mother said that he was being very friendly because he said “thank you” after we had already told him the time…

She’s so disappointed that I’m from the east of Scotland and feel no connection to Glasgow. But she’s the one who sent me to Edinburgh to go to university, so wtf?

John B asks, “English? Wossat then?”

Many bits of the administrative region called England - London, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Newcastle-and-surroundings, Manchester-and-surroundings, Scouseland-and-surroundings and Cumbria, for starters - all have regional identities that are far stronger than any ‘English’ identity.

I obviously don’t know well enough because I’m not English. But from this not-very-distant distance it certainly looks to me as though England, as a ‘nation’, doesn’t have very much in common with itself. Cornwall itself probably has a stronger nationalist movement than the whole of England does! (Whether the English want a national English Parliament or regional parliaments is up to them though. It’s a bit rude of me to tell them what’s what.)

Scotland is the same mind you. There’s probably not an awful lot I have in common with, say, your average person from a remote fishing village in the north. There are at least two major spoken languages (three if you include Scots, as many do) in Scotland. A Scottish identity is there though. Scotland’s Parliament is reasonable — nay, required — because of the separate legal and education systems which Scotland always had, and that’s before you go on to ask about identity or nationality or whatever.

I hate the whole concept of the nation though. I am not a nationality. I am an individual person.

Update: John at The England Project adds his views. The conclusion is one that I agree with.

Why should one nation have a parliament in the union and not the others? Cultural arguments simply do not wash because to have them one has to accept that only countries that have a single and strong cultural identity should have a national parliament.

There have been a few discussions recently, particularly at Stuart Dickson’s blog, about the possibility of Scottish political blog directories, aggregators, and so on.

Now Stuart Dickson has set up a brand new blog, Scottish Political Blogs Review. This is a great idea!

Stuart’s definition of a Scottish political blog:

“a blog written by a Scot, or someone resident in Scotland, which contains a reasonable proportion of posts regarding politics.” The politics covered need not be Scottish politics.

Read the comments of Stuart’s post to see what I think SPBR could be useful for.

Stuart Dickson has painstakingly created all sorts of league tables based on Sitemeter and Technorati data.

There is also a brand new Scottish blogs section on UK Poli Blogs (via).

See also this, this and this.