Should you find yourself walking down Edinburgh's Canongate, you will find there, inscribed on the wall of the Scottish Parliament building, these words of Sir Alexander Gray:

Here, as you stand looking at the modernist architectural dream that is the home of Scotland's peripubescent devolved Parliament, you might well reflect on the juxtaposition of emotive lines of belonging tattooed into the very flesh of the democratic body politic. Perhaps you read the last two visceral lines, ‘flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone’, puzzled at the evocative strength of feeling towards the writer's country and its public projection onto the building of a democratic parliament in a multicultural, left-of-centre nation whose sons and daughters contributed so greatly to rationalist Enlightenment thinking. Your brow furrows further, not least because you are now thinking far too hard for what was a bit of Edinburgh sightseeing, but more, now distracted from the pleasures of your leisure, you are troubled by your own banal invocation of the nation personified with tattooed flesh and sons and daughters as intellectual progeny. Possibly, though, you are more inclined to think that Gray's words hit the nail right on the head: they pretty much sum up how at times you feel about Scotland, or about some other country of which you are a son or daughter.