I was speaking with a friend about where we are as a nation nearly ten years on from the 2014 Independence Referendum. He said something I found to be deeply perceptive.

“We spend too much time on the how and not enough time of the why”, he remarked. Frankie Boyle once put it a different way. If your wheely bins aren’t getting emptied”, he said, “then you’re unlikely to give a shite about the Maastricht Treaty”. And they’re both right. The “how” is for anoraks like me who obsess over court judgements and non-existent Section 30 orders. We need to get back to the “why”. Apathy abounds, and even a true believer like me feels tired with the performative nature of the independence discussion. Nothing turns people off quicker than the perception of a professional elite talking to itself.

I’ll be interested to see how the media covers this month’s anniversary. In contrast to the brilliant writing of guys like Ian Bell, AA Gill and William McIlvanney (all departed too soon. How we could do with them today) I suspect that it’ll all be very low key. There’s plenty of folk I know for whom September 18th 2024 won’t register one iota. And I don’t blame them – they’ve much to think about.

Like so much in life, it’s about taking your chances, and the earliest ones are often the easiest. To me there were three – indyref, the 2015 landslide and Brexit. All missed. My friend always said it would take two votes to get Yes over the line, so from that perspective 2014 wasn’t a disaster. The real disaster was in failing to create the conditions – post Brexit or whenever – for a second plebiscite or similar. No wonder folk lost heart. There’s only so many times you can walk folk up a mountain before walking them straight back down.

On the other hand, how quick does a decade pass? And maybe ten years isn’t a long enough time to work out the answers to the big questions (although we should never stop asking). Football clubs talk about “identity”, or “DNA” – things that supersede individual personnel. Maybe Scotland needs to do the same. Who are we? What are our shared values? Where are we going? In a sense, these are more important themes than the colour of your passport or whether you’ll get to watch Strictly on the telly. I’d like to see us produce a Scottish constitution that reflects our values and that is robust enough to withstand the ever-changing political weather. Because it ought to be perfectly possible to plan for the future while governing effectively in the here and now.

Plus, my younger turns eighteen tomorrow. That a) makes me feel old, b) reminds me that I’d like to enjoy living in an independent country at some point and c) reminds me that we owe it to the next generations.

A final thought. If a week is a long time in politics. So how long is twenty months? Which is the timescale for the 2026 Holyrood vote. I think that’s a long time for Sarwar et al to stay popular and relevant, particularly when his boss in London has effectively written him off. I don’t think another bad election for the current government is a done deal. But that also depends on the SNP.

They say the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. I think we need to ask two related questions. Firstly, what sort of Scotland do we want? And, secondly, what powers and levers do we need to achieve this? Because I’m convinced we don’t have them under a current constitutional arrangement where rolling back devolution is very much a live discussion amongst a political class we don’t vote for.

In a few short years, self-governance has gone from a fringe debate to a mainstream discussion that isn’t going away. Ten years on, Scotland more than ever needs to have the kind of mature debate that represents the best version of us. And that conversation needs to start now.