Alf Young: Long game's left us needing tin hats WHAT to write about in these dog days at the start of another new year? Reflect on my Christmas presents? That splendid new book by Andrew Clark about two hundred years of Clyde steamers, Pleasures of the Firth, and the memories it stirs of my time, as a teenage galley boy, working on the paddler, Jeanie Deans, and then on the Arran, one of the fifties-built generation of Clyde car ferries. Or that Silky pruning saw. The best there is, my gardener son, Jamie, tells me. It's wickedly sharp and, being Japanese-made, cuts on the pull stroke. So oldies like me can let the saw do the work. We might debate why some mature, industrialised economies, like Japan, still make so many useful things so well while others, like ours, are so irredeemably service dominated. But this is Scotland. And still only 2013. There's surely only one thing worth talking about. The national question and that yes-no vote on independence that is still nearly two years away. Last summer in this space - on July 14, to be precise - I warned that the SNP government's decision to play this very long constitutional game carried with it huge risks. And so it has proved. If anything, some of these risks - such as the persistence of austerity-driven economic stagnation across western economies or uncertainty over an independent Scotland's EU status - have intensified since. Multiplying imponderables that are not going to be resolved soon. Raising growing alarm reasoned debate will give way to vituperative assertion and counter-assertion, leaving the majority of us not signed up to either yes or no camps reaching for our tin hats. Here, yesterday, Joyce McMillan expressed concern about how nasty this debate could be. She reflected on how our polarised polity seized on pre-festive remarks by writer and artist Alasdair Gray (about English settlers and colonists dominating our arts administration) and by departing National Theatre of Scotland director Vicky Featherstone (about the bullying she experienced in her time here) and had a field day. What the pair had said, in Joyce's opinion, should have been "left to languish in relative obscurity." I'm not sure about that. I deprecate the nastiness every bit as much as she does. But isn't it part and parcel of a society where every question worth asking has to be processed through the prism of national identity that remarks like Gray's or Featherstone's will provoke a feeding frenzy? What really shocks is the delusional quality of some of what ensues. For instance, in the wake of the Gray stushie, a reader's letter appeared on these pages which fair took my breath away. It praised Gray as a "perfect example" of a Scottish artist, his work "complex, ambitious in scale and original." What's more, it argued, that with other leading Scottish artists and writers - Bellany, Scott, MacDiarmid and Hamilton Finlay were called - "they had to stand head and shoulders above their international contemporaries and pay for it with their own health and well-being." Really? Is this the kind of fanciful distortion that emerges when the prism of national identity is pressed into service across our lives? I've long admired Gray's skill and inventiveness as a draughtsman and illustrator. I enjoyed two of his exhibitions in 2012. I'd previously seen a major show of his posters and book illustrations at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh. But last year I also managed to get to London to see two remarkable exhibitions there. First, David Hockney's monumental A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy, life enhancing landscapes from his native Yorkshire. And then another joy - Lucien Freud's posthumous Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Hockney and Gray are near contemporaries. Which of them stands head and shoulders over the other? The question isn't even worth posing. Gray's book, My Life in Pictures, currently sits beside that Hockney catalogue in my study. David Hockney devoted his whole life to painting and drawing and, now, digital imagery. Gray, Scotland's best known polymath, according to the back fly leaf of Pictures, is best known for his formidable body of written work. I'd cherish the freedom to enjoy both. Gray's comments about settlers and colonists were silly, particularly given his membership, in the 1950s, of the Young Glasgow Group, those Glasgow School of Art students and recent graduates who railed against the then-conservatism and restrictive hanging practices of a home-bred Scottish arts establishment and then spent the next fifty years putting on their own shows. But Joyce McMillan may well be right in suspecting much worse can come from both sides of the yes-no divide. A friend, just back from Hogmanay on a Scottish island, says saltires and union flags are appearing outside houses there. Where my mother grew up, in Northern Ireland, before the Troubles really started, the rival communities used to play a game. Someone would chop down the flag pole with its union flag outside the Orange Hall in a Protestant community. Then someone would paint the chapel door in the nearest Catholic village orange. But, as both know to their cost, it didn't stop there. There's a heavy responsibility on Scottish politicians, of all stripes, to ensure there's no repeat. Joyce bemoans the lack of that third question on the ballot paper offering the enhanced devolved powers "most Scots say they want." She even suggests that in the modern world, whether Scotland is sovereign or not is essentially "a technicality." But that option is gone. There was no agreement about what it would look like. And no sustained attempt was made to explain how, in a referendum, Scots could embrace, consensually, only one of three minority positions. Alex Salmond even said, had there been such choice, the independence option could still triumph, even if enhanced devolution had more support. So we are where we are. What's to be done? Perhaps more of us - among the majority of Scots who don't belong to a political party and take no part in the yes or no camps - should see what we can do to reduce our collective dependency on that prism I mentioned earlier. I don't normally do New Year resolutions. But this year I have three - I promise to go to more art exhibitions on both sides of the border. I promise not to rank the work I see on the nationality of the artist. And, in this space, I promise to write about more things that have little or no bearing on Scotland's constitutional destiny. Now where's that pruning saw?