STILL here? 2016 was the year when you woke up in the morning and couldn’t be quite sure whether you were still alive or had in fact died during the night and your consciousness had just surfaced in one of the levels of Hell. One of the less fashionable levels, where all the really cool and talented people had gone but you were still cursed with the presence of the entire cast of TOWIE, all the Kardashians, Donald Trump and the Tory party, and the Scottish Unionist media were on hand to assure you that it was all the fault of the SNP.

But you don’t have to resign yourself to an eternity of watching Reporting Scotlandshire’s murrderrs, fitba, and the wee cute kittens that prove just how rubbish Scotland would be at governing itself because hairballs are a sign of the catastrophic failure of the country’s health and social care system after Humza Yousaf forgot to pay the pet insurance. It’s not all bad after all. Honest. It’s just that, being Scottish, we have a tendency to concentrate on the crapulosity and forget the good stuff.

Even though 2016 has been an all-round bad year, especially if you were a celebrity who possessed a modicum of talent and realised you had less time left than a Glesca Labour cooncillor facing re-election, there’s still a few flecks of shiny precious gold lurking amongst the crud.

America isn’t getting a tangerine in its Christmas stocking this year because it’s already got a little orange on the way to the White House. Donald Trump has still to be inaugurated as US president, but he’s managed to alienate half of the people who voted for him. He’s not draining the swamp, he’s wallowing in it. And after insisting that he’d be building a wall and not a fence, he’s conceded that his wall will have certain fence-like characteristics after all, at least in those areas where it’s actually going to be built. He’s planning to restart the nuclear arms race with Russia, only without the decent musicians who made the dire 1980s bearable. Bowie, Prince, and George Michael have gone, but the people who brought us Agadoo and The Birdie Song are still very much with us.

Trump is still not officially the president, but he’s already one of the least popular heads of state ever. He’s so unpopular that he can’t even find any stars to perform at his inauguration, although admittedly most of the good ones died in 2016. One of few acts that have agreed to turn up is the cheesy New York female dance troupe The Rockettes, whose management initially told them failure to perform would be a sacking offence. It would have been kind of appropriate for Trump’s presidency to be inaugurated by women who were being forced to perform tasteless acts against their will.

But even with the cosmocatastrophe of a Trump presidency there’s a tiny modicum of satisfaction. After the Brexit vote in June, the United Kingdom was the laughing stock of the world. When the US voted for Trump they wrested back the title of World Champions of Political Stupidity and the world started laughing at them instead. Now it’s just the rest of Europe that is laughing at the UK. It may not be much of a consolation, but it’s all we’ve got. That, and nostalgia for the days when if you said Brexit people just thought you meant you were leaving work early for brunch.

A more substantial consolation is that all of Europe realises Scotland doesn’t share the Europhobic and xenophobic attitudes that led the rest of the UK into a majority vote for Brexit. You can’t change planes in an airport in a major European city without dozens of folk telling you that they fully support Scotland and hope we run away from Westminster as fast as our hairy wee Caledonian legs can carry us. We’ll be running into the welcoming arms of legions of European friends. There’s plenty of room for Scotland in Europe now that the EU is about to delete 1GB of space.

Brexit exposed the intellectual and moral vacuum that lurks at the heart of the British establishment. The day after the vote to leave the EU, Boris Johnson revealed that the broad shoulders of the UK carry a head without a brain. Michael Gove stood behind him open mouthed and glassy eyed doing an impression of a goldfish, although admittedly he always looks like that. There was no plan for Brexit and there never had been. That’s what happens when you claim no-one needs experts any more. You find yourself expertly screwed and looking like a gutted fish at a press conference because you don’t have a clue about how to get the country out of the mess into which your careerist ambition has plunged it. Six months later and no-one is any the wiser about what Brexit will bring: all we’ve discovered is that Brexit means Brexit and it’s going to be red white and blue. The dictionary isn’t much help. If you look up the Oxford English dictionary for a definition, all it says is “Brexit (noun): Brexit.”

The only credible and thought out response to Brexit has come from the Scottish Government. Despite decades of a diet of too-wee-too-poor-and-too-rubbish propaganda from the massed ranks of the Unionist media, 2016 was the year when we learned that if we want competence and intelligence from a government that is determined to protect and defend the interests of Scotland, we’re only going to get it from a Scottish government.

But the big shining nugget of gold in the pile of crap of 2016 is the realisation that we’re living in the last days of the United Kingdom, and Scottish independence is more of a certainty now than it has ever been before. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but it’s a ride that’s going to end with an independent Scotland retaking her place amongst the independent nations of the world. It can’t come soon enough.