Ed Miliband wrapping himself in a fricking saltire wasn't the moment when things really started to feel wrong. But it certainly helped pop the needle over into critical. "All it needs now is for Cameron to put his plus fours on and go out and shoot something," groaned my friend Hugo.  "But that's all anybody Scottish sees when they look at him anyway," I pointed out. My (rarely visited, thank goodness) mental image of David Cameron almost always involves him with a hunting rifle cocked under his arm. Or perhaps it really went wrong with the horrific Better Together TV campaign, in which a poor actress has to look as gormless as possible while explaining how she doesn't really understand politics, being only a humble wee lassie, and therefore she is going to vote "no" just in case her children get eaten by a bear.  Whenever it was, it has been undeniably difficult and rubbish being a no supporter throughout the referendum debate, even if we prevail on Thursday, which I rather think we will. The yeses, though have clearly had all the fun. As a wishy-washy liberal who holds fast to the two great central political tenets of our time, as expressed by David Mitchell of this paper – "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that" and "it just goes to show you can't be too careful" – I am used to being on the side of … well, hopefully, kindness, doing the right thing and everybody getting along. With a side-order in hand-wringing. I am also a terrible coward on social media. If there's an argument to be had on the internet, I am not in it. (Unless it's about dance-trained stage-school brats taking part in Strictly. Come on!)  I have, in general, never encountered anything but politeness and friendliness, from Gallifrey Base to Second Life (I assume. I have not been recently. It's probably an apocalyptic cannibal survivalist wasteland out there these days) – until I outed myself as a no. Then the MacTrolls showed up. Jings, I wouldn't let those bawheids look after a hamster, never mind a newborn state.  But I have found it very difficult being on the unpopular end of the stick. Suddenly, I lost one of my most basic guiding principles towards an unruffled life, which is: if you ever find yourself on the same side as George Galloway, you are on the wrong side. If you find yourself on the same side as George Galloway, Nigel Farage and the Wee Frees, you are so on the wrong side you've gone right over the top and around the back again.  I'm on the same side as the Daily Mail too! Which appears to be taking a short break from convincing us the UK has gone totally down the tubes to press home a slightly perplexing message of: hey, please don't break up this wonderful hideous slutty drunken immoral country where women, gays and foreigners don't know their place! Actually I would have thought that having a new set of slightly more foreign foreigners living next door to despise would have been right up the Mail's street. And I don't want to be that. I don't want to be a foreigner in my own land. A land in which we've participated and worked and moved around; mined, dug, engineered, painted, invented, cared for and bloody well run for 300 years. It is this country – this entire country – that made me. And it isn't all Burns, although he runs through my veins too. It's my country of Viz. Kate Bush. Doctor Who. The Shipping Forecast. Rik Mayall. The Albannach. The Beatles. Stephen Hawking. 01 811 8055. Tablet. Danny Boyle. Hogwarts. Malory Towers. The Night Mail. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Cecil Sharp House. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Tom Stoppard. Wallace and Gromit. Kings Cross- Peterborough- Doncaster- York- Darlington-Durham- Newcastle- Berwick- upon- Tweed- Haymarket terminating at Edinburgh Waverley.  It's my birthright of James Bond. Fish and Chips. Tutti Frutti. Private Eye. Tizer. The Pet Shop Boys. Spit the dog. The Office. The Ladybird Cinderella. Philip Larkin. Flower of Scotland. Windrush. Christopher Hitchens. The Traverse. The Radio 1 roadshow. Mary Poppins. The Tempest. Narnia.  I am Scottish, I am British. I'm European too. Because having the unfathomable luck to be born into a benign liberal democracy means I can live wherever the hell I damn well please. And is this sentimental? Yes. Because the very concept of nationhood is sentimental. It is impossible to watch Shaun Moore's beautiful pro-independence poem Wha's Like Us and remain unmoved. It is an ode to the countries of that sensational Commonwealth Games, asking which of them came crawling back to England once they got their independence.  Given a moment's thought, of course, there are plenty of people from Commonwealth countries who'd be utterly delighted to live in peaceful stable Britain, and, in fact, there are plenty who move here all the time. But its passion and power is undeniable.  We on the other side need this sentiment too, because the flaccid no campaign has focused on the dry, the tedious; the worst-case scenarios, and the scaremongering. It also let pass without challenge a frankly insane franchise that cut out the third largest Scottish city on earth (London), and handed it to (splendid, but quite possibly over-optimistic) schoolchildren. It has been utterly pointless to argue on the facts. Especially when the yeses respond to everything by promising fountains of jam for all, and accuse anyone raising any objections of having no faith in their fellow Scots and being quisling English lackeys (or, occasionally Nazis, as is traditional in political debate).  You cannot win hearts and minds on facts when nobody can agree on them, particularly when the "facts" are often speculative at best; brazen bold-faced billy bollocks at worst. And this referendum is about hearts, minds, guts.  But where is the emotion in droning on about pension provision; about currency exchanges, about whether an independent Scotland will have to put VAT on books or have its own film licensing commission? Where is our blue-painted glory, our own joy in being quirkily, wonderfully, British?  I can't stop thinking about the 2012 Olympics. Then we were British; we saw ourselves then, and when that medal table came up third! Third in the world! Tiny little Britain, with our funny, peculiar, astonishing opening ceremony, producing world-class sports star after star after star. Were we Scots not British then? And would we now turn away? To be tossed out into a hostile world where computers hurl countries up like fivestones for incremental points in a market system nobody understands?  When Tim Berners-Lee tweeted, during the Olympics ceremony: "this is for everyone" did he not mean us all? From craggy glens to rocky Cornish coves; from tumbling Yorkshire stonewalls to green and boundless Welsh fields, to the Kent hops; from the vast flat plains of netherlandish Norfolk to the grey formal stones of the New Town; echoing through the silent shipyards of those great brothers-in-arms: Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast?  Because I want that wishy-washiest of all liberal things: a world with fewer walls, fewer barriers between peoples, between us all. And so my tiny, mimsy, quivering hand is raised, along with many others, more and more. And I shall try to be less timid; to be more sure, more bold. To shout out loud, hearts and guts: Naw. No. No. Never. Swear at me all you like. You shall not take it. My home. My land.
The novelist says Scots shouldn't turn away from the spirit that made the 2012 Olympics a beacon of Britishness