LET’S look forward to Scotland’s Independence Day. I’m afraid I must keep the actual date under my hat, but I can suggest some events to mark it.

It could come in useful, for example, if Nicola Sturgeon looked up Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech, one of the greatest orations of the 20th century, about what he called his country’s “tryst with destiny” on August 15, 1947: “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

It was after this speech that Salman Rushdie named his famous novel Midnight’s Children.

We can be Midnight’s Children, too. At our own stroke of the hour, jubilant crowds will no doubt have crammed into George Square in Glasgow or Princes Street in Edinburgh, into the City Square of Dundee or round the Mercat Cross in Aberdeen, as in public spaces across the country. There will be music, fireworks, illuminations, blue and white for the Saltire, red and yellow for the Lion Rampant.

I hope the new nation’s rather puritanical rulers will, after its 300-year wait, allow the pubs to stay open late so that people can slake their thirst for liberty. You can never tell, of course: it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that we will all be sent to bed with a cup of cocoa and a digestive biscuit.

Even if that is not the case, however, as the wee small hours wear on many revellers will want to be getting home. Probably the buses will have packed up as their crews join in the celebrations, too, so it’s a matter of a cab if the distance is too far for Shanks’s pony.

Then the thought hits us, as it tends to do after a long night out: have we got the money? And on this particular night, there will be an extra worry: is the money legal tender?

After all, the stroke of the midnight hour would also have marked the end of Scotland’s membership of the UK monetary union in which the Bank of England is the final guarantor of everybody’s transactions, big and small. So the new nation will have no legal tender and no lender of last resort.

Yet I would be surprised if it came grinding to a halt. After all, on the morning after (or perhaps, in view of the hangovers, the morning after that) we will still need to go to the shops to get the milk and the papers, to travel to work, to buy our lunch, to get home again. What else can we use but the pounds in our pockets? These will be, as ever, notes issued by the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Clydesdale Bank.

I would be even more surprised if the shopkeepers and bus conductors refused to take them, because they need to be paid too, and on the nail, for the goods and services they are providing. Here in operation is the first rule of any modern monetary system. Money is not gold or silver or cowrie shells. Money is whatever we all agree it is.

After this pleasant discovery, the new Scotland could probably carry on for the time being without making any further big changes to its inherited monetary system. Beneath the surface of everyday transactions, it would work like this: the three commercial banks would continue to issue their notes to anybody who asked for them, subject to the customer’s standing. It would not really matter to the customer that they had, meanwhile, become English, or at best Anglo-Scottish, banks. In fact this is just what they are at the moment, though they do not care to say so.

By the time of independence, the Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland would have completed the transition that started with their rescue from bankruptcy a decade ago. They would have moved their corporate headquarters to London to avail themselves of supervision by the Bank of England, the only outfit around which is big enough to handle convalescent cases of their kind.

The Scottish government would have huffed and puffed when the transfer took place, and no doubt got guarantees that the jobs (low-grade jobs) in Edinburgh and elsewhere should be preserved. But otherwise the arrangement could be to everybody’s advantage. It would mean the two successor states to the dissolved UK retaining a common banking system without a formal monetary union, the latter having been excluded by Chancellor George Osborne.

Now we might have the next best thing. Scotland would get no guaranteed say in the system, but could expect the Bank of England to fulfil its statutory duty and regulate in such a way as to avoid disruptions and disturbances, whatever the contrary political pressures. For proof, look at what governor Mark Carney is doing today.

Such was precisely the sort of situation that a previous governor, Mervyn King, had in mind when he was asked in an interview how he might have coped if Scotland had become independent in 2014. His answer: “Nothing happens. Scotland just carries on using sterling. There was no need for an independent currency, that wouldn’t have posed any threat or difficulty for an independent Scotland. And I see no reason why it would have caused a problem for the Bank of England to allow banks to keep on functioning in Scotland.”

But the real beauty of this scenario is that it does not close off wider options. After independence, the Scottish Government could make a start on creating a central bank as an eventual counterpart to the Bank of England, but more to the point as the vehicle, further down the line, for a soft Scexit from Mervyn King’s sterling area.

First, this bank would become the nation’s monetary authority, removing from the three commercial banks their power to issue currency (I doubt if we’ll miss them). New notes would come with the imprint Central Bank of Scotland. Its pound would shadow sterling to begin with, though with the option to float off if conditions demanded it or allowed it.

This is not a simple situation to be in, though in recent times other nations have similarly created central banks and currencies from scratch. In our case the question at once arises over what reserves the central bank would have.

I think Scotland would be entitled to an eight per cent share of the UK’s official reserves, as a common resource of the Union. Our 14 billion out of 170 billion US dollars in those reserves should be enough to be going on with while the nation works to improve its mediocre economic performance, the true key to future financial stability.

Further down the line still, other options open up – such as joining the euro, however unattractive that may seem for the time being. It is not true, by the way, that Scotland could somehow be forced to join the euro, because no country can be forced to join the euro. On the contrary, entering the euro involves an exacting procedure. Since the fall of communism in 1990, six of the 13 countries which have entered the EU have not entered the euro, despite signing a treaty that obliges them to do so. In the cases of Sweden and the Czech Republic, this is because they do not want to.

In practice, then, there is a quarter-century of grace, at least. The problem of Scotland’s future currency is nowhere near as urgent or grave as the No sayers make out.