Shit on my shoe

My heart is not in the highlands. My family comes, in fact, from the industrialised countryside of West Lothian, spread like rubble between Glasgow and Edinburgh, where there is no a-chasing the wild deer, just tracts of grey, pebbledash housing schemes, disused coal mines and factories.

When I was growing up in the area the only West Lothian question people asked was why anyone, except perhaps Tam Dalyell, would want to live there. Twenty years ago our corner was officially designated as an area of severe deprivation, or at least practising to be one. It may be different there now.…