Travelling across Britain last week to interview ordinary people about the upcoming local elections and whether the UK still sees itself as one country, there was a scene in the Highland town of Aviemore that summed it up rather well. On the high street two election posters were hanging next to each other: one for the party that wants to take the UK out of the EU, the other for a party that wants to take Scotland out of the UK.

Earlier, a man in John O'Groats, on the most northerly tip of mainland Britain, had explained that the people on the north-east coast were different from those in the rest of the Highlands. "We are of Norse descent here, we are not Highlanders. So we don't want Gaelic on our road signs." Another said that the problem was not only London, and Edinburgh, but also the local capital of Inverness. "The money just stays there." By which he meant "the state money".

If elections are the main ritual by which a nation imagines itself politically, then the UK last week felt comatose. Asked about their local polls people would give me tired looks that seemed to say: "Poor foreigner, you fell for that one? Let me set you straight." Then would come a couple of dismissive or contemptuous phrases and that was the end of it. It was hard to argue against that view, as many justified their apathy about the elections with their ignorance of them.

With one or two exceptions people seemed to look at politics as a talent show with really boring contestants. You could follow it, or you could ignore it – a lifestyle choice. Either way, it would make no difference to your life. "Without wanting to sound ageist," a girl in Newcastle told me, "I suggest you go find some older people if you want to talk about the elections. That generation still cares about these things."

She had worked in a Labour call centre for a while. It was a paid job, not voluntary work, and it taught her one thing, she said: "How to take abuse."

For a Dutchman like me this swamp of cynicism and indifference sounded very familiar. It was a huge contrast to Egypt though, where I lived for a few years before the revolution. Egyptians would be grateful if the government got anything right. In the Netherlands and the UK people seem to get annoyed if the government gets anything wrong. Electoral rhetoric drives up expectations.Is the UK still a country? Coming into Edinburgh Airport it was hard not to notice just how similar the place was to a terminal at some London airport. With the exception of the ubiquitous RBS billboards ("here for you"), it was the same shops and restaurants selling the same stuff while the Scottish tabloids were consumed with a story about Simon Cowell.

Expressions of national sacrifice are everywhere. In the departure/arrival room at the Wick airstrip, surrounded by photos of the Prince of Wales opening the refurbished airport, there's a plaque dedicated to those who fell manning the Wick Aerodrome between 1939 and 1945: "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn." The rest of Wick is dotted with memorials, with one pink pillar commemorating the men who fell in places as far apart in time and space as Zululand and the Nile, Sebastopol and Waterloo.

For centuries this isolated place hundreds of miles from London has been sending its sons to die in far-away places. What will happen to these memorials if Scotland breaks away?

And is there still such a thing as a country anyway in a globalised world? It proved difficult to discuss local issues with people, as so many issues had regional, national and global components. Petrol prices, poverty, jobs and crime – to name but a few.

A man in Plymouth explained that he didn't hate eastern Europeans for taking the jobs that British-born people refuse to do, but he did hate them for sending their earnings back to their countries of origin. Then a woman explained that she was unlikely to vote as the local authorities had failed to get rid of the stench coming from a sewage works. She and her husband had been living with it for 17 years, writing at least three letters a year. She still couldn't hang laundry outside to dry. "They can't seem to get anything done," she said with a kind smile about the people in city hall answering her letters.

However, this is my favourite anecdote, pulling in many threads of how the local and the global now interact. In Wick, in the far north of Scotland, a woman described how she used to take out car insurance from a local agent. He would come to her house every month to collect payments and that is how it worked for decades. These days, she said: "I have to ring a call centre in India and they make you listen to music as you are put you on hold and then you have to deal with somebody you don't know, and every time you call it's somebody different." After losing his job, she continued, the insurance agent had found a new one at Tesco, the retail group that had put so many local shops out of business. "You can't help going there," she said with what sounded like guilt. "It's too ... too convenient."

She paused for a moment, then added with a firmness that struck me as peculiarly British: "But I have never stopped the milkman."