Today I’m happy to bring you another installment, prompted by a newer campaign for Scotland’s Homecoming, which uses Dougie MacLean’s sentimental song Caledonia (plus Sean Connery, Lulu and others) to help remind us how lovely Scotland is.

It’s not the first time MacLean’s song has been used in advertising. Scottish lager brand Tennent’s ran ads back in 1990 – a mere four years after the McEwan’s ad – which also successfully tied together that song and a dollop of sentimental Scottishness to sell their rather pissy brew. But we’ll draw a veil, because the ad is a classic of its type.

Before I give you the video itself, here’s the plot (warning: spoiler).

Cue music – “I don’t know / if you can see / the changes that / have come over me”… And our floppy-haired hero (this is 1990, after all) is in (pah, spit!) London, on a grey, nasty day. It could be any day. He’s a yuppy, on the make, but hey – we have to make a living, even the dreamers.

We start underground, away from any light, at the apparently unholy hour of 8.15am. He clambers aboard a packed tube. He sees other unfortunates struggling to find their way around The System. It is a grim, dog-eat-dog world, far from care-free Caledonia. “In these last few days / I’ve been afraid / that I might drift awaaay“…

Surfacing to the packed streets, he sees a cyclist fitting a mask to guard against the filthy air of England’s filthy capital (a scene pictured above). He sees those ghastly Londoners arguing in the street, because that’s what they do. Finally arriving in his glass-fronted yuppy hive he pins on his name badge, enters the packed lift with the other drones… and, as we take a close look into his eyes, says inwardly: Fcuk this for a game of soldiers. “That’s the reason / I seem so far away todaaaay“.

Go on yersel, rebel!

Striding out, he chucks the namebadge back, taking a suspicious look from a security guard, lobs his briefcase in a bin lorry – attracting the ire of one of London’s many gargoyles – and before you can say “downshifting” there’s Edinburgh castle lit in Scotland’s permanent sunshine.

Now he’s on Princes Street buying a newspaper from a friendly man and – in a moment – entering a civilised bar mostly filled with pleasant women drinking Tennent’s lager. His friends await and, as Frankie Miller sings “Caledonia’s everything I’ve ever had”, our hero finally sups his pint of suds.

And just when you think the drama’s over – his laughing face transmogrifies into a newspaper page being held by a women standing – wait for it – on the tube. She looks wistfully into the middle distance, and we fade to black. She needs a lager too. The cycle begins again.

The ad follows what we can now identify as a pattern in Scottish bevvy ads in my youth, which is to rail against the prevailing Thatcherite, capitalistic ethos of the day, in favour of breaking away and enjoying more traditional pursuits, such as the bevvy. You’ll recall that the McEwan’s ad from 1986 was noted for being based “on ‘The myth of Sisiphus’ by Albert Camus [...] meant to show ceaseless and pointless toil as a metaphor for modern lives spent working at futile jobs in factories and offices.”

This ad, I think we can agree, is another chip off the Camus-esque block. Do enjoy.

But there is far more shocking news emerging from Scotland today, surrounding smooth-voiced Charles “Chick” Young (right), often rightly called the Barry White of Scottish sports reporting for his mellow broadcast reflection on matters both on and off the pitch and who, for a man of such fame, is well-known for the remarkable modesty with which he holds his many views.

Our hero had to be stretchered off the park during a Journalists vs MSPs football match on Sunday, following a red-blooded tackle from Labour’s John Park, which led to the MSP’s sending off before the game was entirely abandoned.

News of this shocking assault has only emerged today.

Red-faced MSP Ken Macintosh, who also played in the game, can be heard in the audio clip accompanying this story on BBC Radio Scotland about the match, expressing his regret and apologising to the Chick.

But it’s a measure of Chick’s legendary perspective that, even though the programme was clearly trying to play the whole episode in an ill-judged attempt at “laughs”, he found the courage to not accept that apology, and also brand the tackle as “evil, in my opinion”.

Talking to the Scottish Daily Record, Chick added: “John Park did me.  I’ve got six stud marks down my leg. I’m still limping.”

Chick told the Glasgow Evening Times: “They played like thugs. The treatment of us and the ref was scandalous.”

Chick added, to the Times: “One guy playing at the back for them was a nutcase of the first order and their language to the ref was scandalous. They totally lost the plot.”

And Chick pointed, in an interview with the Scotsman, to the clear political ramifications of the rammie, reminding his public: “What worries me most of all: these are the people who are in charge of running the country.”

The journalists had been losing 6-2 to the people in charge of running the country before scuffles broke out and the game was abandoned.

Adds that Times report: “One of Mr Park’s team-mates said that the journalists had over-reacted. ‘I don’t think there will be a return match.”

• My regular reader will recall Chick’s last appearance on this blog, when we brought you this classic YouTube footage of an ill-fated interview with Rangers manager Walter Smith. Warning – strong language on the other side of that link.

A couple more links from today’s Times; first, Magnus Linklater asks: “Where would that rescue fund, its value estimated at about £100bn – the equivalent of Scotland’s entire GDP – have come from?”. Unlike Fraser Nelson in the Spectator (quoted yesterday) Linklater sees a “penal” level of taxation in a parallel universe where Scotland is now independent.

Meanwhile, a leader in the same paper reckons “when the Scottish financial sector, the fifth largest in Europe, cannot survive without help from London, the case for the Union is strengthened… The Union that has served [Scotland] for three centuries may be the only asset in Scotland that has not depreciated sharply over the last two weeks.”

Alex Salmond is, of course, playing a long game; future electoral reform that reduced Scotland’s over-representation in Westminster, and/or removed Scottish MP’s votes from English and Welsh matters, would usher in a long era of Conservative government. That would certainly aid Salmond’s cause, and the pain of this crunch might by then be forgotton, as the Guardian’s Severin Carrell pointed out yesterday.

But this is all just politics playing on our short memories; you’d have to worry the fundamentals would not necessarily have changed in Scotland’s favour by then, whether or not we could remember the worrying times we’re living through today.

[Later: Shaun Milne, who first pointed out that "financial Culloden" story to me yesterday, praises the Scotsman's coverage of the crisis - especially the title's exploration of the political angle to Brown's bailout.]

While this morning’s Financial Times refers to Brown being hailed as a hero around the world, back home there’s a warning his rescue plan – involving part nationalisation of Scotland’s two biggest banks – cloaks a “financial Culloden” for Scotland. Bill Jamieson writes in the Scotsman:

“This is a massive humiliation for Scotland’s banks. The injection of government money through preference shares that will yield 12 per cent crushes the interests of the ordinary shareholders.

[...] I fear that, once the panic and hysteria that overwhelmed markets in the past month have subsided, this deal will create a blazing resentment among shareholders. They will see it as a Treaty of Versailles of finance, with the banks bent double by crushing reparations.

Humiliation? For the banks, yes. Resentment? I’m not so sure. It would be hard to have too much sympathy for those “ordinary shareholders”, whose holdings were, at least, rendered worth something by the rescue. They’d had warnings, as the Scotsman itself reported earlier in the year, and many would have enjoyed the ride on the way up.

No, to find the true impact you need to think a little big bigger, alas. It’s the elephant in the room spotted, elsewhere in the same paper, by Peter Jones.

“”Prudent, cautious, responsible” and “stable, reliable, solid” – the characteristics of three centuries of Scottish bankers and their banks all seemed instantly vaporised the moment it was announced yesterday that Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax Bank of Scotland had been forced to collapse into government ownership.

The humiliation of this admission of catastrophic failure, the injury inflicted on national morale, the shame of having to go cap-in-hand to politicians, will reverberate around the nation for years, with as yet incalculable consequences for the political economy of Scotland.”

It’s Jones’ “national morale” point that interests me most.

These extraordinary events must, surely, have an impact on Scottish nationalism, which has been enjoying a resurgence in recent years.

Two questions. First, could Scotland ever, really, be independent while London owns a big chunk of the national banks? Would it want to be? Of course, you could argue that London always did own a big bit of these huge, multinational businesses, but not the government, specifically.

Second, could an independent Scotland possibly have funded the help now being given to RBS and HBOS? Even in good times cash would be a little more tight in an independent Scotland; shoving £37bn on the national balance sheet could have provided a debt for generations, even if you believe (as I do) it might turn out a decent investment in the end for the taxpayer.

Tackling the second question first, last weekend’s Scotland on Sunday could only unearth generalities on how an independent Scotland would cope. There were some suggestions a Prime Minister Salmond could follow Ireland’s lead in guaranteeing all deposits, although a Scotland in the Eurozone could do little by itself about interest rates.

There’s an interesting discussion below the piece that points out Iceland – used as a role model by Salmond in the past – was never a good example for Scotland, because it has a smaller, less diversified economy. But there is, also, the general admission this is a global problem over which a single nation – whatever its size – has limited power.

The most chilling quote on what would have happened in an independent Scotland was left to the end of the piece, and it was supplied by a senior (presumably unionist) Scottish banker.

“HBOS would have gone bust and RBS would have followed five days later. The Scottish state simply wouldn’t have enough money to rescue two banks of that size as Iceland has done. As it would have been a Scottish problem rather than a British one – they’d both have gone to the wall.”

That’s not a consensus view, either among commenters at the Scotsman or voices on other publications.

At the Spectator, Fraser Nelson argues that London (with some added Brussels for good measure) would wade in to save RBS and HBOS whether Scotland was independent or not. He thinks a combination of Brown protecting a British banking network, and the European Central Bank swooping “like a vulture trying to nationalise the banks of Scotland for the everlasting glory of Brussels” would have picked up the pieces.

That rather answers my first question; were Nelson right, we’d have ended up with today’s actual arrangement whether or not Scotland had gone it alone.

Just to cheer us up, Nelson also notes that Scotland’s last spell of independence ended with the Darien Disaster, which led to Icelandic-style bankruptcy and union with England. That latter fate, he warns, may still await Iceland (“at gunpoint”) if relations don’t improve soon.

We certainly can’t argue any more that it’s just nationalists who are miserable now.

Oh yes, the emails are buzzing around today.

The relegated team always remembers the dreadful goal conceded in the last game that condemned them to lower-league football – the one where the midfield gave it away, the opposition forward ran unchallenged, and smacked it in the net off the backside of the goalie.

They’ll bemoan the bad luck, try to tell themselves they were unlucky and just too good to go down, and forget the wet Wednesday night back in February when the team just couldn’t be bothered to turn up, and relegation seemed a remote possibility. After all, they were too good to go down then too.

All this I know from following Swindon Town. But Scotland weren’t, of course, getting relegated. Indeed, at least by previous measures they massively over-performed. But the real damage was done during the disastrous Berti Vogts era, when Scotland’s world ranking fell so low our seeding vanished, and – even after he’d gone – as a consequence we were lumped in a European Qualifying group with both World Cup finalists.

That we could compete in that group was a remarkable turnaround. That we arrived for our last game still with hope even more so. But, even then, that unlikely ticket to Austria and Switzerland wasn’t really lost yesterday at Hampden.

My old mucker Shaun Milne hits the nail squarely on the head when he writes:

“No, it was thrown away against Georgia on October 17 when a lackluster performance away from home resulted in a 2-0 defeat. Our worst performance of the campaign.”

There you are; this morning’s nagging disappointment – it’ll be around a while, and dug up again next summer – had its seeds sown between 2002 and 2004, during Berti’s disastrous reign, and was reaped in dreich Tbilisi.

The moral of the story? Every moment counts, and for longer than you might expect.

Well, it’s like this. Scotland play Italy tomorrow at Hampden park, in Glasgow. Win, and we’re through to the finals of the European Championships – a fitting end to an incredible run of results that has seen us beat World Cup runners-up France in Paris, thump the Ukraine at home and – unusually – deal more or less competently with the smaller sides in our group.

Qualification would be a huge achievement, but not undeserved.

And, remarkably, Scotland’s odds of getting through are better than England’s, who face an anxious wait to see if Israel can frustrate Russia and thus give them the opportunity to qualify.

But, but, but… enough of this rationality. When I hear John Greig – scorer of the goal that brought Scotland’s only victory over the Italians back in 1965 – telling TV today “you never see Italy murdering teams”, never see them “winning by four or five”, something stirs deep inside. Mainly fear.

All fear, if we’re being honest.

I don’t know what it is, but they say traumatic childhood events – even ones you weren’t really aware of at the time – can cause this.

If you can watch the game tomorrow, watch. You’ll see a small nation launch off on an extraordinary celebration if the remarkable happens, and our scrappy team of honest professionals and one occasional genius manages to get a result. Lose, and I’ll wager Hampden will still rise to their team at the end, an ovation from a crowd that will go home saying they just knew that was going to happen and oh, well, who fancies a drink anyway?

In the meantime, I leave you with the ultimate expression of Scottish footballing brilliance, hope and – ultimately – despair. It’s Archie Gemmill scoring a goal so special we can never really forget that 1978 World Cup, the one many thought we’d win, despite the fact even that goal, that victory, wasn’t enough to qualify for the second stage. The World Cup we’d really like to forget, but probably never should.

But he draws a different conclusion.

“The more pertinent point, however, is to question how the present administration in Edinburgh intends to pay for the NHS as its costs escalate and the funding diminishes. Thus far, ministers in Scotland have not had to worry too much about their share of the national cake, because the cake has expanded so dramatically. Twenty years ago the Scottish budget was around £12 billion a year. Within the next two years it will have reached £30 billion – an increase of 150 per cent. That has allowed spending commitments that would otherwise have been inconceivable.

Alistair Darling’s Comprehensive Spending Review has put a brake on that… [the SNP] know that, sooner or later, they will have to confront the reality of government: to cut their coat according to the cloth available.

Ironically, that would happen very rapidly, and very drastically, if they won their goal of independence and found themselves having to raise their own taxes in Scotland. At a stroke their budget would be reduced, their spending targets curtailed and their accountability ruthlessly exposed.

SNP ministers may even now be wondering if the independence game is worth the candle.”

He’s being mischievous, I’m sure. I don’t think those SNP ministers will be having any doubts. Moving Scotland to independence remains a long game, not one for this or the next administration. There’s precious little reward for taking unpopular but pragmatic action now to alleviate a problem that may never arise.

And, of course, the problem will certainly never arise should the SNP not make a good fist of things now they’re in power. Which brings us back, full circle, to the electoral bind I was talking about earlier in the week; the powerful disincentive the SNP has to do anything but spend on public services, and the problems Gordon Brown faces if he can’t mirror Scotland’s success in healthcare delivery.

But, as a Scot living in London, I’d know where I’d rather fall ill.

The health system in Scotland is markedly superior to that in London (I can’t speak for the rest of England). It’s the little things – like being easier to get an appointment to see the doctor – that make a difference. Other benefits are reeled off in today’s Telegraph:

“Scottish residents already have access to free eye care and dental check ups, free personal care for the elderly, extra central heating grants and a number of drugs deemed “too costly” for the National Health Service in England and Wales.”

Thing is, it’s hard to argue Scotland shouldn’t have these things (although someone will). It’s a standard of care for the rest of Britain to aspire to, not crush. Those of us down here have a right to ask why, given NHS spending has doubled under Labour (£92bn this year – which rather puts the £60m it’ll cost to abolish Scottish prescription charges in perspective) things aren’t much better everywhere.

It’s doubly interesting when there’s an SNP government in Holyrood. Looking through a cynical eye, you can see there’s no disincentive for the nationalists to spend, spend, spend. They can, simultaneously, do the right thing for their voters – and generous healthcare provision for an unhealthy nation is a good thing to spend your money on – while also increasing the chances of goading London into doing something that would guarantee stronger nationalist voting in the future. The SNP is spending on someone else’s tab, and there’s no need to face reality until they’ve achieved their goal of independence.

How long can Labour stand the obvious gulf in public sector provision, and spending, between north and south? Faced with losing middle England, London Labour’s shown no backbone over things like inheritance tax. What might happen to all those Scottish Labour MPs if, again faced with a revolt from the shires, they voted to take money from Scotland through revision of the Barnett formula?

Scotland, handed either higher taxes or reduced healthcare provision, would surely take revenge at the ballot box – and usher in Tory government down south.

Maybe Labour, recognising this bind, will instead look to recreate the Scottish healthcare dream down here. That would be wonderful, if expensive. But they’ve spent lots already. So for now, those of us in London left waiting days and days to see a doctor, even after Brown’s billions, might still ask: can he manage to deliver?