"Isn't it hard not being independent? If you want to build something, you can't build?"

I don't know what it is about the London to Glasgow night bus, but every time I'm on it I seem to find myself sitting either behind or in front of two people who are complete strangers to each other, but who strike up an instant friendship and talk for hours and hours.  Last night, it was a young English woman studying at Dundee University, and a man from distant shores who has been in the UK for five years, and who was travelling to Scotland for the first time as an adventure, because it's too much hassle getting a visa for other European countries.  He knew very little about Scotland, and bombarded the woman with questions about what the country is like and how it's governed.  He seemed a bit perplexed to discover that our taxes still go direct to London, and ruefully told her that Britain had treated his own country in much the same way for two hundred years.  No, no, no, she protested, it's not like that at all, Scotland isn't exploited like an old British colony, because all the money is spread out fairly throughout the UK.  But he was still confused, and asked her : "Isn't it hard not being independent?  If you want to build something, you can't build?"

It just goes to show that it often takes a complete outsider to find true perspective on what is at stake.

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Now that I'm home, I've finally had a chance to look at the datasets from the bizarre Sunday Post poll of over-60s.  It's not possible to make a direct comparison between the headline numbers of this poll and the equivalent age-specific results from previous Survation polls, because breakdowns are usually only given for 55-64s and over-65s.  However, if we look at over-65s only, one thing that leaps out at me is that the Yes/No split with Don't Knows excluded is absolutely identical to the numbers for the same age group in the Survation poll from July, which of course showed the Yes campaign just five points behind among the whole sample.  The No lead in this poll (with DKs excluded) is also only 2% higher than in the over-65s results from the June poll, which similarly showed a 5% gap on the headline numbers.

There's not a huge amount that we can read into yet another poll of a conveniently No-friendly demographic group, but we can at least be reassured that the results are perfectly consistent with a very low No lead.

And don't worry - the unionist media haven't exhausted all of the imaginative possibilities yet.  Coming soon : did members of the Orange Order think Alex Salmond won tonight's debate?  Check out tomorrow's Daily Mail for an exclusive YouGov poll!

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While I was travelling, I couldn't work out how to embed the Phantom Power video that I took part in, so here it is now -