Last Call...

Who now has anything new or useful left to say? Not me, I'm afraid. I envy those of you who have retained any kind of eloquence for a great last word before polling day. 

As the rejected aftermath of failed first drafts on my floor attests, it is a terrible temptation, making your last call on a campaign as long, complex, and multi-coloured as this, to write insufferably. Too pompous, too breathless, too conscious of the significance of your subject to really do it any kind of justice.

You sit there, and you think "And now, for the inspirational bit." And then you wait, you twiddle thumbs and slurp coffee, and consider an overwrought passage or a blank page. It isn't that there aren't rousing things to be said, both for Yes and No, but they've all been said. Today, I won't try to inspire or persuade you. Whatever you do on Thursday, do what you think best. 

After a week of frayed nerves and gathering hypertension, a calm, mulish resignation has set in. I'm reconciled to the result, come what may. For me, Thursday's vote comes down to this: responsibility, self-government, democracy. A sense that folk in Scotland can and should see themselves as active citizens, with a stake in politics, recognising the many deep-seated challenges which face us, but doing our best to try to change them, while preserving what is worthwhile. Other folk see things differently, and have faith about what we can still be achieved within the Union. I've always tried to respect that, while making the case for self-determination and self-government.

I am conscious that we will have experienced different campaigns. There's no straightforward story to tell about this collective experience. For some it has a good-natured pleasure and a welcome challenge, for others something harder, less instructive and less fulfilling.

Speaking only for my part, it has been a unremitting privilege. I've had great craic, have met splendid folk, thought a lot and learned a lot. I've made what I hope will prove lasting friendships on both sides of the question, been given surreal opportunities, and above all, a splendid subject to write about. What aspiring scribbler could hope for more? Yesterday, I turned 28 years of age. Tomorrow, I'll cast a vote for independence in a referendum which four generations of my family have been agitating for, and which I never thought, in my lifetime, I'd see. These have been interesting times, in the best of senses.

I wasn't happy with Monday's piece when I published it, but reading it back with a little distance, I came close to capturing my somewhat complex feelings in this final, fretful furlong. It is important to bear in mind common ground, empathy, and compassion in the coming hours and days. It remains important to keep the heid, to keep perspective, and not to let any stray, hard words touch you, wherever they emanate from. 

I've always been keen on Machiavelli's view that our liberties are best preserved by a noisy and self-assertive people, rather than a cowed and complaisant one. Ordered conflict isn't the death of politics, but its essence. Disagreement may superficially seem an unharmonic thing, but in order to have any kind of meaningful conversation, you must share an accepted, underlying code. It seems to me that for the great part, this country, which has long been a stranger to this kind of process, has done its best.

W H Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts is explicitly about suffering, tragedy, and its commonplaceness. It has kept popping into my head this week. In the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the golden boy falls from the sky - plop - and the world trudges on, tilling fields, unpicking nets, in a half dwam. "The expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on." 

Tomorrow is not a day of suffering or of tragedy, but for most, a day full of ordinary business and concerns. Off to work, dawdling in supermarket aisles, refilling the car, preparing dinner for the kids, nipping into the pub for a swift half on the way home. Some of us will stand outside polling stations, knocking up doors, making our cases in the campaign's final hours. And for a few minutes, in the nooks and corners of that ordinary day, using the simple technology of paper and pen, four million people will take a long-anticipated decision on Scotland's future.

It is the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of that, its "human position", which most strikes me today.