Here’s the thing: I was always (and remain) open to persuasion on independence for Scotland. I have close pro-Indy friends who are good, clever, thoughtful people. I’m well aware there was a respectable argument to be made for independence and there still is.

I voted against it in 2014 because I believed the inevitable economic destabilisation and upheaval was being seriously underplayed by the SNP, and that the impact would be felt, as it always is, by the poorest and most vulnerable. I still think the SNP had no good answers to serious, good faith questions and Sturgeon offers none in her book. IMO, the SNP was asking us to simply cross our fingers and jump in the belief that myriad complexities would magically resolve themselves. As I said at the time, people like me weren’t the ones who were going to suffer serious injury if the landing turned out to be a lot harder than promised.

Did pro-union people behave badly, as well as nationalists? Yes, without a doubt. In any binary contest, you will look around and find a lot of people standing in your camp you don’t have a single thing in common with except on a single yes/no question.

There’s a reason, though, that far more nationalists than unionists look back fondly on the run up to the referendum time. Pro-independence politicians were happy to impugn remainers’ motives in very ugly ways, and plenty of elected MPs and MSPs contributed enthusiastically to online toxicity.

When people who call a country home and love it are called traitors and Quislings by their own elected representatives for having questions about currency unions and sterlingisation, their feelings about that country inevitably shift. I used to see the Saltire in such a positive way. I felt it belonged to everyone; it was a flag with no negative associations whatsoever. Then 2014 happened and I realised my naivety, because I was told (along with millions of others) that it didn’t belong to me, that I had no right to it, that I was insufficiently good and Scottish to be included beneath it.

I know very well those sentiments weren’t shared by everyone in the Yes camp, because, as stated above, I admire and indeed love certain Yessers. The fact remains that a lot of people on the No side came through that referendum with certain illusions about Scotland shredded.

Sturgeon sees everything through the prism of identity politics. She assumes all No voters must have been deeply attached to a British identity, but that simply isn’t the case. Lots of us were persuadable, but if the knee jerk response to common sense questions is ‘you’re a unionist traitor, a scaremonger and no true Scot’, don’t be surprised if the questioner becomes sceptical about the inclusive, egalitarian, welcoming utopia independence activists swore we’d be living in once they were in charge.

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