Abstract :
IN NOVEMBER 2002, I joined Glasgow´s The Herald newspaper as a writer at large. I worked from the paper´s Edinburgh offices, and my first column was triggered by a real-life incident at Waverley station: an engine got somehow uncoupled from its train and travelled several miles without a driver. The Flying Scotsman turned the Fleeing Scotsman, so to speak... What, or who, was it fleeing from? And where was it heading for? I used this incident as a metaphor to compare Scotland of the early 2000s to a driverless locomotive. It appeared then that the country, in the throes of devolution and with its parliament controlling a meagre 10 per cent of the budget, had largely lost its direction and was developing haphazardly: one step forward, two steps back.
