Looked at from one angle alone, there is only loss involved in an independent Scotland. Each side of the divide has attachments that will crumble if the other side wins. Sometimes I wish people on both sides would recognize that.

For us on the independence side, it is a loss of potential and progress. We genuinely feel that the longer we stay in this union, the more days we lose when we could build a better and fairer country. For every day we stay, we’re stuck in the company of a sclerotic and undemocratic mess of distant, often hostile forces.

On the unionist side, there would be loss of the UK. I don’t understand the attachment, but I recognise it. I know that for some of my friends, it’s an ideal they want to belong to. And not being part of the union means they lose those ideals. Politics, they say, is transient, and some day politics will align with us. But what is important are the foundations and the shared values.

In the end, only one side can win because these two sides are irreconcilable. One must give, and selfishly I hope that it will be my side that prevails. I think that my side will win, eventually. Sooner or later. When it does, I don’t want to be a dick to friends who will have lost something.

I have no-voting friends who have been my friends since before September 19 2014. The reason they are still my friends is that they recognised my loss on that day, and didn’t behave like dicks. They gave me space, and a hug. And then left me along to get it out of my system. They didn’t gloat. They didn’t mock.

They recognised that this had been something important to me, and that I needed to grieve. The banter, it came later when it was safe and when I wasn’t still bleeding. When the banter came, I was ready to give as much as I got, like a proper and true Scotsman.

I’m sure they were as selfishly relieved that I had lost the referendum as I would have been if they had lost. That irreconcilable thing, again. Only one side can win here. I hope it will be me. But I’m not going go be a dick if I win.

I think the relationships on this isles will be better if the old countries split apart. I think we’ll get more done together as a collection of different units, as a new thing, as a new Britain that’s not nationalist “Britain”, but as separate countries working together for a shared goal. A new Britain, which only means the the island, and not the mental construct with its now toxic contents.

I guess that’s my spiel to unionists. It is earnestly meant, even sympathetically so. I don’t know if anyone will believe it. I don’t know if you believe this now, and I don’t really care.

What I do care about is that looking at it from a certain angle, independence for Scotland only means loss. But after that loss, the side who wins, needs to do what my friends did. Give the losers a hug, step away for a while. Not gloat. Not be dicks. And then we have to roll up our sleeves and build that better Scotland.