IF YOU’VE a hand basket about your person, prepare to get into it. Your destination? Why, hell, of course – the only place anyone ever went in a hand basket.

My travel advice is aimed at the one in seven of you in Scotia Minor who believe eternal damnation awaits when you hand in your final betting slip.

I was shocked to read this news, garnered from a YouGov poll. What had these people done to believe they deserved prodding with tridents in fiery pits? The figure was only one in ten in Britainshire as a whole, making us – as usual – the worst in the United Kingdom.

Defensive voices said it was just that we took a dimmer, harder view of our moral worth. A kind of “black humour” was adduced, particularly from those who’d had a good time on Earth and now believed, in the Scottish spiritual tradition, that they should be punished for it.

While reeling from this news, the poll kicked me again: offered the chance to live forever, 50 per cent of Scots would turn it down. Hell’s bells!

Only 27 per cent wanted to stagger on endlessly. These happy, desperate, perhaps frightened few were vastly outnumbered by those who, presumably, saw immortality as a trifle tedious and repetitive, like the satellite TV schedules.

These latter folk were certainly not afraid of death. Indeed, only 16 per cent of Scots said death scared them “a lot”. Nearly 30 per cent said they weren’t scared “at all”. They beheld the Grim Reaper and said: “Come ahead, big man.”

The poll found that, overall, only 36 per cent of the citizenry believe in any kind of afterlife, which is odd, since more than this usually describe themselves as Christians, perhaps in the belief that it gets you tax relief.

Who knows? And who knew? Hell, eh? My own belief – that life on Earth is hell – is held by only a minority of indigent philosophers.

True, there is for most people an absence of tridents and sauna-like heat, particularly in Scotland. But when you think of all the times you lose your reading glasses, just miss the bus, or trip on a pavement crack as a beautiful lady is approaching, you know this is a malevolent place.

The question is: what did we do to be put here? Something bad, presumably. And in a previous life at that. My own presence here is, I believe, the result of an administrative cock-up. Somewhere in eternal paradise there is a Ronald McNeil, who should have been down here in my place.

He’s the one who should face daily torture, alleviated only by old episodes of Star Trek and selected products from Mr Gregg the baker.