Since May everything has gone quiet. I sometimes wonder if the Scottish nationalist body is sleeping or else that it has died from lack of interest. Sturgeon is tired and irritable. She is only 51, but there is increasing speculation about her retirement. It wasn’t so much the Covid virus that did for us as her exposure to Salmondella. The strain was virulent and the strain on Sturgeon’s bowels exhausting. If Scottish independence is the promised land, then Sturgeon is Aaron to Salmond’s Moses and neither will see it.

But the Scottish nationalist corpse still twitches. Angus Robertson grabs you by the ankles as if it is the end of Nightmare on Indyref Street Part 23. The plot is very familiar by now. Perhaps Robertson is merely hamming it up for the Indy Marchers and the other fundamentalists. But no with Kenny MacAskill’s intervention we can shout out like Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein “It’s alive! It’s alive!”