Take my money, Rory, take my house, my car, anything - but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD don't take me on a guided walking tour of "the Middleland"

You've probably heard by now that the unspoofable Tory MP Rory Stewart is using crowdfunding in an attempt to finance his new "Stones Against Self-Determination" project (aka "Plan C").  The highlight of the fundraising page is a photo bearing the caption "the first stages of design", but which actually appears to be of Rory and a couple of groupies randomly performing Tai Chi in a field.  He's looking for £50,000, which I would imagine will be quite a challenging target, given that so few of his friends in the Conservative parliamentary party have any spare cash.  But in a valiant and self-sacrificing effort to hurry things along, he's offering this irresistible perk to anyone prepared to stump up £1000 -

"£1000 - A walk with Rory Stewart, MP

A tour of The Auld Acquaintance [ie. the pile of stones] followed by a walk in the beautiful Scottish borders with Rory Stewart OBE MP.  Rory is an acclaimed author and has walked 6000 miles on foot across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal.  More recently, he walked 400 miles across his constituency of Penrith and The Border."

Three hours ago, the first £1000 donation came in from an anonymous benefactor - but he/she decided against claiming the reward of a walk with Rory.  It does give a whole new meaning to the phrase "you can't even give it away".

*  *  *

PS. How exactly do you give someone a "tour" of a pile of stones?  Isn't that another way of inviting them to walk in a circle for approximately twenty seconds?

*  *  *

PPS. Are you as impressed as I am that Rory didn't merely walk 6000 miles, but did it "on foot"?

Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Middlelanders love their children too

Well, it's now official from the BBC website - the unspoofable Tory MP Rory Stewart has abandoned his "Hands Across the Border" wheeze of 100,000 people forming a human chain in a location up to 68 miles south of the Scotland-England border.  He's taken this tragic decision for "logistical" reasons.  Hmmm.  I wonder if those "logistical" problems might conceivably include - a) not enough people, and b) the wrong border?

Rory's Plan C (it shouldn't be forgotten that "Hands Across the Border" was itself a replacement for an earlier plan to organise a mass walk) is the building of a border cairn to symbolise the love and respect that at least seven members of his local Conservative association have for Scotland - but only if it doesn't have the impudence to become an independent country, of course.  It remains to be seen whether the "border" where this cairn is to be located will be the actual border, or instead the border between the bit of England south of Hadrian's Wall and the bit of England north of Hadrian's Wall.  It would be rather amusing if Rory still hasn't worked out where Scotland starts.

The BBC article also contains the funniest caption on a photo I've seen for a long time.  It reads : "Rory Stewart said Scotland would be missed for personal reasons."  That's a bit like the brief, apologetic obituary that a family member might write for a mass murderer : "OK, we know, but we'll still miss him for personal reasons."

"Obituary" being the operative word.  If there is a Yes vote in September, it wouldn't surprise me if the London media don't report on Scotland becoming an independent country, but instead declare : "Scotland died today at the age of 307.  She wasn't much cop at anything, but she'll still be missed by one or two people as she was occasionally known to make a half-decent cup of tea."

My predictions for Tuesday's Eurovision semi-final

Marcia is quite right - it's high time for Scot Goes Pop to revert to being a Eurovision blog for a good few days (albeit a Eurovision blog that reserves the right to immediately drop everything if a new referendum poll is published!).  I must say I'm a touch underwhelmed by the standard this year - there are certainly songs that I like, but not a huge number, and there's nothing that has really got under my skin in the way that I Feed You My Love and Crisalide did last year.  However, if you go back to virtually every Eurovision that took place up to and including the year 2000, there were rarely more than a tiny handful of good songs, and yet the contest was still a great spectacle in a variety of other ways (the utter chaos of Rome 1991 being my own favourite example), so hopefully that will be the case again this time.  I do worry that the semi-finals may drag a little more than in recent years, though.

Of course what any Eurovision fan looks out for in the line-up of entrants is old favourites from the past, and as usual there are a few.  Most obviously, Valentina Monetta (aka "the only singer in San Marino") is representing her country for a third year in a row. I would imagine that must be some kind of record - Peter, Sue and Marc famously represented Switzerland four times in the 70s and 80s, but not in consecutive years.  Monetta's first two entries couldn't have been more different, which is odd because they were both written by Ralph Siegel.  The first was an excruciatingly awful - but strangely compelling - novelty song about Facebook, while the second was the aforementioned Crisalide, a powerful pop ballad which in my opinion ought to have been a strong contender to win the whole contest, but which ultimately failed to even make it out of the semi-final.  I'm relieved to say this year's effort Maybe is much closer to being in the Crisalide mould, but it's considerably blander, so logic would suggest it probably isn't going to make it through.  Strangely enough, though, it's still one of my six or seven favourite songs in the contest - it's got the slightest hint of a "60s/70s Bond theme" vibe to it.

Also returning - although we won't see them until Thursday's semi - are Romania's Paula Seling and Ovi, who finished third in the contest back in 2010 with the song Playing With Fire (which I seem to remember Doug Daniel saying was just about the best Eurovision song he'd ever heard).  This year's entry Miracle doesn't have quite such a strong hook, but it's still got tonnes of energy, and up against an unusually weak field it wouldn't completely surprise me if Romania sneak into the top five again.

And last but not least we have Sweden's Sanna Nielsen, who has never actually appeared at Eurovision before, but who has nevertheless been associated with the contest for years and years due to her multiple attempts to win Melodifestivalen - a massive annual Swedish television event in its own right, but which doubles up as the Eurovision national selection.  (Although she came closest in 2008 with Empty Room, the one that sticks in my mind the most is Du Och Jag Mot Världen in 2005 - and she certainly looked a bit different back then!)  Not only did she finally seize the Melodifestivalen crown this year with Undo, but she's also rated by the bookies as one of only two entries with a serious chance of winning Eurovision.  The other is Armenia, which I've listened to a number of times and somehow can't quite picture as a winner - I think the style of the song is going to divide opinion too much.  So almost by default I've come to the conclusion that Sanna Nielsen will probably emerge victorious.

In many ways, that wouldn't be great news for the contest, because it would mean a third Scandinavian winner in a row, and the second Swedish win in three years.  However, maybe my expectations will be different after watching the semi-finals, and there's always a chance of a slightly weaker song coming out of nowhere to win on the basis of some inspired staging, as Latvia did in 2002 and Azerbaijan did in 2011.

So here's my prediction for the ten qualifiers from tonight's first semi...

Near certainties :

Sweden
Armenia
Ukraine
Hungary

Fairly likely :

Estonia
Azerbaijan
Russia

I'm not at all sure about these but I'll have a punt :

Montenegro
Netherlands
Iceland

That would mean San Marino, Latvia (who are singing a song about baking a cake), Belgium, Portugal, Moldova and Albania all missing out.  Of those six, probably Belgium are the most likely to make it through - it's an intensely irritating song, but it does have a big finish.  In my personal opinion San Marino, Portugal and Albania all thoroughly deserve a place in the final, but I just can't see it happening unless the juries go for them very heavily.

Marcia pointed out the other day that everyone's new favourite Tory astroturfing campaign 'Vote No Borders' were tragically too late to put forward Flowers of the Union as the UK's Eurovision entry, although of course we shouldn't entirely exclude the possibility that Children of the Universe was originally entitled Children of the United Kingdom before falling foul of the EBU's rules on political lyrics.  But it set me thinking about previous Eurovision songs that extolled the virtues of Europe as a united entity - perhaps those could have provided some kind of model for our anti-independence friends?  Take for example the Irish entry from 1990, which managed to finish joint second mainly by name-checking pretty much every country in western Europe...

"Don't you remember those Adriatic days?
I miss your laughter and all your little ways
I can still see you in London, walking on Trafalgar Square
And drinking wine in Old Seville, how I wish that we were there

Meet me in Paris on a Champs Élysées night
We could be in Rome again, 'neath the Trevi fountain light
We should be together, maybe we just might
If you could only meet me somewhere in Europe tonight"

A Rory Stewart twist on that song might have reminded us that the 'baa' noise that sheep make in Lanarkshire is uncannily similar to the 'baa' noise that sheep make in Lancashire, before building up to this rousing chorus -

"So I've driven all the way from Penicuik to Hull
Oooh yeah baby, just to get it through your skull
That I don't really care where you hold my hand
Just so long as it's somewhere in the Middleland"

* * *

Sticking to a musical theme, you might remember that at the end of Celtic Connections I mentioned a band called The Cask, who were brave enough to perform a song at the Danny Kyle Open Stage that explicitly called for a Yes vote in the independence referendum. Well, Michael McElligott (who wrote the song) got in touch with me the other day to mention that he's just made a studio recording of it. I've had a listen, and it's rather wonderful. I'm not sure whether I was being given permission to post the sound file here, so to be on the safe side I'd better not, but it'll be available on iTunes soon. Be sure to look out for it - it's called Make Alba Shine.

The mad, mad world of Rory Stewart MP

You've really got to hand it to Rory Stewart, the half-Scottish Tory MP for Penrith.  There aren't many 41-year-olds from these parts who can honestly claim to have served as the colonial Deputy Governor of a conquered Middle Eastern country (no wonder he thinks the union is such a spiffing idea), but his real flash of genius was to invent a fantasy kingdom ("the Middleland"), complete with its own 'lore' and made-up history, and then persuade the BBC to produce a glossy dramatisation within a matter of months.  How does the guy do it?  The Lord of the Rings trilogy may have eventually made to it the big screen, but not until 28 years after Tolkien's death.  Elves and orcs of many worlds salute you, Rory.  And so does Aslan.

Anyone who watched Peter MacMahon's Representing Border show last night was in for an unexpected treat, because for some bizarre reason the anti-independence campaign decided to put up "Rory the Tory" as their right-of-reply option for the package about Alex Salmond's St George's Day speech.  When he first appeared on screen, I thought to myself, "surely we're not going to hear any more about Better Together's answer to Narnia, that really would be too much to hope for so soon after we were all spoiled with the epic BBC production".  But it seems that when interviews are conducted right in the heart of the magical realm of "the Middleland" (ie. Carlisle), dreams just can't help themselves from coming true...

"We were in fact, for 700 years, a single unit.  The Middle of Britain was different to the south of England or the north of Scotland.  That's why reintroducing the border would be a tragedy, because people in Newcastle have far more in common with people in Edinburgh than they do with people in London, or people in Edinburgh do with people in Inverness.  I believe REALLY strongly that we have SO much in common.  We speak the same language!   The Scotch that's spoken in southern Scotland, the English that's spoken in northern England, it's...it's...THE SAME WORDS!"

Crikey.  There can't be many languages which lead people to actually use the same words.  You've hooked me on this Middleland magic, Rory - do please go on.

"We've got exactly the same type of economy, we have the same sheep on our hills.  We move back and forth, we have a very similar landscape."

Oh sheep, oh hills, oh streams, oh air, oh grass, OH BRITAIN!!!!

Yup, that was pretty much the strictly non-political message of Tory Rory's two-part BBC 'documentary' Border Country : The Story of Britain's Lost Middleland, which was entirely coincidentally aired in a prime-time slot just six months before the date of the independence referendum.  In case you're wondering how in God's name the story of a wholly fictional land (even the name was Rory's invention) came to be produced by the 'factual' arm of the BBC, apparently they thought it would be OK just so long as Rory was forced to drop in occasional disclaimers such as "I like to call it the Middleland", and "many scholars disagree with me, but..."  The latter seemed to be Rory-speak for "no-one apart from me actually believes this".

In case you missed it, the central idea of the "Middleland" campaign video (sorry, educational history show) was that Britain existed as a single harmonious island nation, until the bastard Romans came along and split us in two, thus giving rise to the concepts of England and Scotland.  I was actually fairly open-minded about this idea, because of course all nations have their origins somewhere in history, and intuitively it seems entirely plausible that a distinctive Scottish culture may have come about as the serendipitous by-product of a foreign occupation.  But the bizarre thing is that Rory used up most of his precious minutes of propaganda airtime seemingly trying to disprove his own theory.  It appears the Romans needn't even have bothered, because as soon as they left a united and indescribably wonderful "Middleland" culture immediately sprang up on both sides of Hadrian's Wall.  It was only several centuries later that the south of Middle-Earth (sorry, "the Middleland") was gobbled up by the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, and the north of Fantasia (sorry, "the Middleland") was gobbled up by the mongrel kingdom of Scotland.

So where exactly do the Romans even come into this?  It seems like the modern border is just the point where two conquering armies happened to collide with each other, several centuries after Hadrian's Wall was abandoned.  The Angles and Saxons on one side of the divide hadn't even set foot on British soil at the time when the wall was an actual frontier.  But in an unconvincing attempt to hint at a non-specific causative link, Rory waffled about how the border was set "just a few miles north of Hadrian's Wall".  Well, yeah, if you call 60 miles on the eastern side "just a few miles".  The most terrifying thing about the programme was the creeping realisation that when Rory links hands with "one hundred thousand" members of his local Conservative association on Hadrian's Wall later this year, he actually will think that he's more or less doing it on the real English-Scottish border.  The "hands across the border" thing isn't just a figure of speech as far as he's concerned.

When Rory wasn't berating the Romans for splitting one country that nature intended to be indivisible into two, he was moaning about the fact that there should actually have been three countries (England, Scotland and "the Middleland") rather than just two.  Er, has he never heard of Wales?  The irony is that the Celtic cultures of Wales and Cornwall are the remnants of Rory's beloved pre-Roman unified nation of Britain.  The Brythonic-speaking peoples who ended up confined to those regions were displaced from the rest of the island by the invading English - who of course had still been residents of Denmark and northern Germany at the time of the Roman departure from Britain.  As for the Scots, the basis of our non-Brythonic culture was the conquest from the west by Gaelic-speakers.  It used to be assumed that those invaders were Irish in origin if you go back far enough, but the modern school of thought is that Gaelic was spoken in a small portion of western Scotland for just as long as it was spoken in Ireland.  That seemingly unlikely situation came about because the west was cut off from the rest of the country due to the challenging terrain, but had easy links to Ireland via the sea.  Rory started his programme by suggesting that Britain's natural borders in Roman times were the sea, but that couldn't be more wrong - in those days the sea was a highway that enabled cultural and linguistic closeness, and the hills were a natural frontier that fostered cultural and linguistic separateness.  It was the hills that created Scotland, not a Roman wall.

The supreme comedy moment of the show was when Rory visited a churchyard somewhere in "the Middleland", and pointed towards a Viking grave.  "This is the kind of thing you'd just never see in the south of England or the north of Scotland," he told us breathlessly.  Yeah, because as we all know, not a single Viking ever set foot in Orkney, or Sutherland, or the Western Isles.

'You do not speak for Scotland, sir'

Gerry Hassan has written a very detailed analysis of last night's Newsnight debate on 'the future of the Union'. I must say that personally I wouldn't be quite so effusive about Rory Stewart's performance - he's undoubtedly very articulate and has a 'screen presence', but he got himself into very unwise territory when he flatly informed a Scot in the audience who gave primacy to a Scottish identity that "you do not speak for Scotland, sir". Stewart's proof for this assertion was that his own father is Scottish, lives in Crieff and is "very proud to be British". This, of course, is the classic Tory delusion that got them into such a pickle over the Poll Tax - forget about elections and opinion polls, authentic Scottish opinion is represented by their father or third cousin once removed, or that well-bred chap they once canvassed in Drymen. Admittedly, for as long as there is more than one view held among the public, no-one can literally claim to speak for all of Scotland, but what evidence we have on majority opinion is clear enough - the Scot in the audience was much closer to speaking for modern Scotland's aspirations than that British imperial throwback Rory Stewart, former Deputy Governor of two Iraqi provinces. No wonder Rory still thinks there is something terribly "precious" to be lost if the Union bites the dust - how many other thirtysomething Scots have been given the wizard opportunity to rule a conquered Middle Eastern country? Would never happen under independence.

While we've seen much worse from Paxman, he was scarcely the most even-handed moderator, allowing Michael Portillo to wax lyrical for several minutes about the supposed historic British tradition of anti-fanaticism, but almost biting Joan McAlpine's head off when she tried to introduce a bit of balance by pointing out that one of the first acts of the British state was a pogrom in the Highlands of Scotland. "Oh, we're not going back to that," he groaned after an apparent Damascene conversion about the unimportance of British history, "I want to look forward". Earlier, he had taunted McAlpine about the failure of the "Scottish banks", but ten seconds later airily brushed off a member of the audience who pointed out that many of the bankers in those "Scottish banks" were English. My own point would have been more that those banks failed under UK rather than Scottish regulation, but doubtless Paxo would have regarded that as a "cheap shot" as well. He's certainly the expert on those.

The other thing that leapt out at me from the debate was the utter incoherence of the argument put forward by the representative of the English Democrats. Once again, it seems that underneath the veneer they are classic right-wing Brit Nats, who are lashing out at Scottish and Welsh presumptuousness with an affectation of English nationalism. What England is crying out for is an equivalent of the SNP or Plaid - a left-of-centre (or at the very least centrist) civic nationalist party that believes in English self-government for the right reasons.