Mark Smith

Quick memory. 1996 or thereabouts. I’m standing in the old Daily Record building near the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow. Top floor: above the bridge, above the birds, above everything. The moment sticks in my mind because it’s one of the best views in the city – or was – and up on the roof, as high as you can go, is where acrophiliacs like me get our hits. Height is good. It feels good up here.

Don’t be angry with me. I know my knowledge of football is not great. I know it’s not my specialist subject. I know I’ve only ever done one sports-writing in my entire career and the editor never asked me back because I didn’t know what nutmegging was. But bear with me please, because I want to write about football today. In particular, I want to write about how me (Scottish) became an England football fan.

Has everything changed? The numbers say so: SNP down from 48 to 9. Labour up from 1 to 37. The headlines say so: “Keir Starmer wants new positive relationship with Scotland”. Even my feelings say so, yours too maybe. For years: anger, frustration, more anger. Now: relief, satisfaction. Hope?

This is weird. Labour has won, the Tories and the SNP have lost, and Liz Truss has been rightly punished for putting up my mortgage. So why don't I hear D:Ream telling me that things can only get, can only get better now I found you?

May the 22nd. Rishi Sunak, sans umbrella, announces the date of the election and John Swinney, all nice and dry indoors, says that calling it during the Scottish school holidays is an act of disrespect by the UK Government. He says the election planners won’t have given it a moment’s thought, and it demonstrates the contempt the Tories have for Scotland.

It sometimes feels like the only fact we know for sure in this election is that it’s happening on July 4th (with some of the people who heard it first allegedly heading straight for the bookies – kerching!) Everything else is contested. NHS waiting times are going up / going down. Migration numbers are higher / lower. Labour will tax you more / less. But at least we can rely on that venerable, old, trusted source of data, the census. Can’t we?

I’ve got quite the collection now. A letter from the Tories telling me the only option is the Tories, a letter from the SNP telling me the only option is the SNP, and a letter from Labour telling me the only option is Labour, and because I’m a good little voter I’m reading them all from start to finish. Then Keir Starmer says something and I think: oh, so it’s going to be like that is it?

I’m sitting in a house in Glasgow talking to a mother about something I thought, or hoped, no longer happened. Slowly and carefully, she talks me through the details – the shocking details – and cautiously and warily, tells me how they’ve all been affected by it. “We’ve been traumatised,” she says, “and then retraumatised by how the system has let us down.”

Good news, bad news. The good news is that an important historical building in Scotland has apparently been saved from demolition. The bad news is that an important historical building in Scotland has apparently not been saved from demolition. It’s the story of our country’s built heritage really: lots of hope, piles of rubble.

How do you like your eggs? Fried? Scrabbled? Or splattered on the face of a politician? For years, for decades, for centuries, protesters have reached for food when they’re angry at public figures, usually eggs but anything will do really. The question is: with Nigel Farage coming under fire twice in the last few days, are lefties turning the election nasty?