After a break, it's time to have a bit of a download for posterity if nothing else. OK, nothing else. A General Election has been called. Probably the most important for decades. Or probably not.
And the recent marches by 'All Under One Banner' is probably a good place to start.
They attract the usual rabble rousers as speakers - Sheridan, Shepherd, Cherry ... but never Ms Sturgeon.
This new age of direct democracy has a number of parallels to other places where representative democracy never took hold. Most notably, the middle eastern countries where the leader lives or dies by 'the street'. Jostling likely successors, whilst of course being utterly loyal, can play to the street's emotions.
Sturgeon fired the starting gun for Indyref immediately after the EU referendum and her supporters rushed to mobilise. She of course knew that it just wasn't a runner - the underlying financial state of Scotland (the oil price!) has deteriorated (that Growth Commission seems to have been buried as unwelcome news) and there's no majority for leaving as she knows. But the street doesn't bother about that: #dissolvetheUnion #UDInow they proclaim, as if the world really was as simple as themselves. So she has to keep stringing them along: new speeches will be timetabled to reveal the.. timetable... some time soon.
The Street begins to get restive. The party loyalists appear on platforms denouncing the wicked Tories, the wicked Unionists to rapturous applause. La Sturgeon must sit in palace watching... and waiting... and worrying...
