A date

Walking to St Andrews House this morning I stopped to take a picture in Regent Terrace, intrigued by the French Flag with the plaque below it.

The building is the residence of the French Consul General - that much I knew.

What I didn't know was that the building was the Scottish Free French House opened by General de Gaulle in 1942 as a "safe house" for French service men and women working from Scotland during the Second World War .

In his speech at the opening of the building de Gaulle said this : " I do not think that a Frenchman could have come to Scotland at any time without being sensible of a special emotion. Awareness of the thousand links, still living and cherished, of the Franco-Scottish Alliance, the oldest alliance in the world, leaps to his mind."

The plaque quotes him on the issue of the "oldest alliance n the world" but it was the date of the opening that jumped out at me from it : 23rd June, exactly 74 years to the day before the referendum on EU membership which Scots supported but England & Wales did not, thus endangering that "oldest alliance" like never before.