We can talk about it

A dear friend of mine was invited for dinner last night, by her hospitable Scottish neighbours in a lovely village in the French département Languedoc-Roussillon. Haggis was on the menu as a belated Burn's Night observance.

Now my friend is exceedingly English; she's rabidly monarchist and unapologetically Thatcherite, too. So I wonder how the evening developed when the topic of Scotland's independence, three hundred years after the union, cropped up?

Here in the Sandlands the Gulf News reminds us that three-hundred years on from the formal joining of England and Scotland, the likelihood of Scotland -which now has its own parliament - separating completely appears to be growing. Polls earlier showed that 52 per cent of Scots would like to see their country become independent - and 59 per cent of English people are in favour too.

But the newspaper interviewed some local expatriate Brits on the subject who, they concluded, generally "doubted the benefits of a separate Scotland".

I wonder, I do.