We love You, We Love You Not........

I am living at the epicentre of the biggest Hogmanay party in Europe and do you know how I feel? Not great, really. The roads are closed, the buses are diverted and the streets are filled with case draggers and stravaigers who clog the pavements impeding my passage.

Still, the message is writ bold on the hoardings - We love you. Taken at face value , who exactly are the ‘we’? Please don’t include me. I would rather we went back to the Hogmanay of old when it was an evening for friends to get together and bring in the new year in each other’s houses with a lucky first footer (a tall dark haired man carrying a piece of coal for the fire ) welcomed over the doorstep as the first visitor of the New Year.

Now it has been commercialised by Edinburgh town Council, eager to benefit from filthy lucre, as a big extravaganza, a party with outdoor entertainment and promoted world wide so that there are now half a million extra bodies in the centre of the city to the detriment of the ordinary residents going about their business.

On closer deliberation, someone has suggested that the message is about Scotland wanting to be connected to the rest of Europe. Fair enough, ‘we love you’, but no one has asked me to what lengths of inconvenience I am prepared to go to achieve that aim.

The man wearing the Gordon’s Tammy and the Rupert the Bear scarf is, I wager with certainty, a visitor, capturing the Johnnie Walker moment on the other side of the Mound.