Ruth Wishart: On the road with the Yesmobile

What I said had a pretty immediate impact. The Edinburgh-based paper for which I had been writing regularly, the one of which I’d previously been the senior assistant editor, suddenly stopped responding to any of my communications.

It seemed a price worth paying. There was huge excitement in the air. We all felt we were in at the start of something big. We all felt that independence for Scotland might be just around the corner.

READ MORE: How artists and creators helped to shape the 2014 Yes campaign

When the campaign moved up a gear I went on tour with the Yesmobile, an elderly Beetle.

I covered a fair bit of Scotland in it in the company of Jean Urquhart, who became an SNP MSP for the Highlands where she’d been an SNP councillor and who, on the back of living there for a few weeks, latterly decided to make her home in Shetland.

We had nothing as grand as a mission statement; just a conviction that we had to speak to groups of people in their own habitat rather than trying for formal meetings. We knew, even then, that it was the doubters who had to be convinced.

We visited Arran and Islay in the West and Shetland (of course) in the north. Once, I remember, we ambushed folk in a sympathetic doctor’s surgery.

READ MORE: The Blue Book: 'Conspiracy theories' or Yes campaign's secret weapon?

Always, we talked about how a truly independent Scotland could transform all our lives. Maybe not immediately but certainly not too far down the line. We rented accommodation from farmers and anyone else who would have us.

My favourite was a little thatched cottage in Arran where my then dog could play footie in the garden.

Our wardrobes were what you might call the pocket variety. A series of Yes T-shirts laundered (by Jean!) en route with a few pairs of jeans and undies.

We arrived everywhere with Yes badges and pens and anything else we could lay our hands on to distribute at ad hoc meetings. I remember being able to deploy a Yes pen visibly on the newspaper review on The Andrew Marr Show.

I had also hoped to join the bus tour already doing a much more ambitious 16-stop epic in the spring of 2014 but the dates never worked out. The Listening Lugs bus was originally born in 1997 thanks to Willie McIlvanney.

Its successor tour included such luminaries as Neal Ascherson, James Robertson, Karine Polwart and Billy Kay. The fact of so many prominent members of the cultural community putting their time where their mouth was entirely emblematic of the run-up to the poll.

When I read how supposedly divisive it all was, I wonder if the critics suffered from false memory syndrome.

Outside of two kenspeckle figures, pretty well the whole artistic community in Scotland became energised. 2014 became a giant party for the Yes community.

It was the best of times, and only became the worst of times when the reality dawned that the vote had been lost.

But an enthusiastic strategic campaign had seen the pro-independence vote rise by almost 20%. Who could forget the panic-stricken surge north by so many Westminster parliamentarians a week earlier when Yes was briefly ahead?

Had I located the genius who went up and down their ranks with a loudspeaker on his rickshaw which advised us all “your imperial masters are here” I would have kissed him whether he fancied that fate or not!

And yet here we are, a long 10 years on, with the principal architect of some of the dafter Better Together scare stories now sitting in Westminster as a Labour MP.

You couldn’t make it up – and sadly I don’t have to!