One year on

This is the first anniversary of the referendum and what an extraordinary year it has been.  I am lucky to have a record of it in this blip journal but I am even luckier to still be able to see the events unfold from a (nearly) ringside seat.

So at 9.00 this morning I was at Pollock Halls in Edinburgh (still a little shell shocked from arriving back from Bosnia last night at 10.00pm) to hear John Swinney introduce Nicola Sturgeon to speak  at the first  ever joint SNP Parliamentary Group away day which also happened to be, we were told, the largest single party group of parliamentarians from Scotland ever assembled in the country : no less than 122, consisting of 64 from the Scottish Parliament, 56  from the Westminster Parliament  and 2 from the European Parliament .   We were also able to mark a new high point in SNP membership - 112,208 which equates to about one in 50 of the population. 

Her speech, like the event, was  full of confidence and hope and  will act  as an early springboard for the campaign for next year's Holyrood Elections, a campaign which, she announced,  John will direct .  The day was also a useful opportunity to share good practice and establish collaborative ways of working, which are , I am glad to say, well underway in Argyll & Bute between Brendan O'Hara and myself. 

In the late afternoon I spent a couple of hours in my Scottish Parliament office catching up on essentials and then drove to Glasgow to attend the launch in the University of the Gaelic translation of Alex Salmond's book on the referendum about which I interviewed him on stage earlier this year.    The paperback of the book has also been published this week. 

It was good to be at the event in various guises - long term friend and colleague, helper to get the translation arranged and Glasgow University staff member.  It was very well attended and Prof. Rob O Maolalaigh introduced him with grace, good humour and scholarship.  The number of people who wanted signed copies was unbelievable but in the end we all got away in order to enjoy a tremendously sociable dinner at Alex's favourite Glasgow restaurant, the Alishan, which was the place that our old much missed friend Bashir Ahmed used to take us when we first started working with the Glasgow Asian community.    Amongst those who came along was Gerard Burns, whose paintings I have always admired and an image from whom used to  dominate  Alex's office in Holyrood. 

Cathleen had come over to Glasgow to attend the book launch but we  had to hurry  back at the end of the evening to make the midnight ferry from Gourock and eventually got home at 1.00 am.   

Exactly a year before we had been  slowly and painfully absorbing  the referendum result - but what a difference a year has made.   Far from eroding confidence , the energy and enthusiasm of the referendum campaign has driven us all forward , determined to achieve even more.