COMING off the shoulder of the land into the Lothians on a spring Tuesday with the skies clearing, you get images of yourself, transparencies upon transparencies.

I do, at any rate. You look into the glass and glimpse. Each picture is a different picture.

Lived there; we lived there; she lived there; and - sooner or later - whatever became of that? Did they start knocking over the old school before those diggers went into the park for the new one? That used to be called a slum. That used to be where - it'll come to me - they lived. Sky and sea and the hard rocks don't change much, but all else, lives above all, flows around them.

Which is normal. It is, in fact, as it should be. Memory vouches for nothing. I am attached in particular and peculiar ways to little scraps of the planet; others have hearts that leap at a Tay crossing, at Glasgow in the rain, at Manhattan in the mist. Only a few say they have no emotional debris. I don't believe them.

As I come upon Edinburgh on an April day, a former Labour prime minister is making a speech in which "proud patriotic Scot" is a laboured trope. I am just about old enough to remember Gordon Brown as one of the last of the lads of pairts, storming the University of Edinburgh when brilliance, rather than tuition fees, was all that mattered. Once we took his kind of thing for granted. Now he's trying hard to make a distinction between patriot and nationalist.

As an argument over language, it's rubbish. A classicist will solve it for you. I could also give the former PM a few cheap shots about royal babies, Cenotaph ceremonials, horrible wars and colours trooped. I could ask about nations and patriotism, ask why one loyalty cements a shared trust and one - so they're telling me - is just destructive and ugly, beyond the pale and out of bounds.

I'm a nationalist. It amazes me faintly that anyone would still think to ask. On a merely theoretical level, the reason I'm agitated over Edinburgh traffic on a spring Tuesday is a person who clarified this argument. But we'll get to him. Deal first with the argument that it is grand to be a patriot and wrong, in some nasty ways, to be a nationalist. Discuss ...

As fairly as I can put it, what follows is the claim that a patriot shares and a nationalist excludes. The former embraces everyone who ever had a granny, but the latter wants to know where granny was born. A patriot, self-defined as decent, would not exclude anyone. A nationalist is only understood as one who treats accidents of birth as stripes of merit.

In Scotland, it happens. It happens about as often as people claiming that to born under the flag of Union involves a special kind of grace. David Cameron, much like Gordon Brown, has been uttering that sort of stuff lately. On the left, I get asked how I could break trust with a Geordie. On the right, they want to know how I could betray the fallen of the Somme, and all our shared grief.

Me, I'm still in a cab looking at the old, shining city. If a place ever made a person, this was it and this is me. One way or another, I lived it all, schemes and New Town, the suburbia of falling leaves and the hard pavements, all points of a small compass, places you'd walk a mile to avoid and places I couldn't afford. I know Edinburgh, hill to hill and shore to shore. Been there.

It catches the heart and breaks it to fragments. There's a stupid reason in that, of course: everyone comes from somewhere. But since this is stupid and obvious, it hardly begins to justify a politics. The reason we're in this taxi on a spring night is in part to mark a character who asked the contrary question: if we all come from somewhere, what does anywhere mean to any one of us?

As a kid growing up in Scotland, the very idea of an Irish Consulate existing would have been the first line in an argument meant to pick a fight. We got devolution, however, and our neighbours granted us - and I'm still shuffling my feet - diplomatic recognition. They took it for granted that a nation and a capital with a parliament would expect no less. Perhaps knowing better than some of us, they did not quibble over versions of nationalism.

A Scottish consulate in which to pinch canapes and listen to Eddi Reader will be along in due time, I'm sure. In the Scotland of my memory, the notion that the Irish government could host an event in the New Town for people who want to mark Scotland's place in the 1916 Rising would have been - in every word of that sentence - unthinkable. That might be one detail: you can become a nation before you know it.

There are still Edinburgh voices in my ear. They want to know how boring on about James Connolly in front of people ready to agree with you justifies - likesay - nationalists in Scotland now. Me reciting the primary lesson about the connectedness of nationalism and internationalism won't do. Another homily (with footnotes, if you like) on socialism here and socialism everywhere probably won't cut it.

During the referendum, many went to great pains, too often ignored, to say they were not nationalists. Many good people wanted a Yes vote precisely because, as they said, all kinds of nationalism revulsed them. I just wanted to pare the world to its bones: this is where I live and where I live would be better off making its own, fundamental choices.

I can think of people who would now be saying that a distinction between nationalism and self-determination is still another version of special pleading. So I don't bother. I know why hacks from dying parties are keen, in the death throes of an ancien regime, to call the politics of place fascistic. They could try it to my face.

Edinburgh in the spring sun makes my heart swell and burst. It does not make me a "proud patriotic Scot". I don't wave flags or watch displays on the Castle Esplanade. I am courteous to tourists and hardly ever point them towards the remnants of the wee slum in which James Connolly was born in Scotland's capital city. But every damp, soiled and gritty bit of it is mine.

What's nationalism? In the end, just who you are. What's a nation? Who knows until we find out. Why would that frighten anyone? It appears they were happier when my kind were frightened of the world into which we were born. Well, then: never mind.

I don't say that granny's Uncle Jim was the best poet I ever read. I'd hesitate to say he was any good at all. But he did try some verses on what people wanted. They might apply to the argument. One Connolly title was, "We Only Want the Earth".