The moment will be forever seared into my memory. Dancing in a pub in Kirriemuir during a friend’s stag do.
Everyone stopped and looked at the big screen. The subsequent cheer was near deafening.
Mo Farah burst over the line in the Olympic 10,000 metres, sealing a gold medal in the process. It had been a great sporting hour. Jessica Ennis won heptathlon gold and Greg Rutherford snatched long jump victory.
This was special, though. A Somalian-born British national crowning glory for his country.
There was, it seemed, a mood of optimism all round.
It had started with Danny Boyle’s inspiring opening ceremony, showcasing all that is supposed to be good about the United Kingdom.
Fast forward four years and many of us are glued to television screens once again, cheering on Olympic hopefuls.
Now, though, all the optimism which accompanied that sporting pinnacle seems to have drained away.
I’m tired, in a multitude of ways. I suspect a great many people are.
It’s not just the fact Holyrood has been in recess for five weeks and I’ve not had a holiday yet.
Yes, MSPs were supposed to saunter off closer to the sun (not like Icarus, of course, that’s a bad career move in all sorts of ways), allowing journalists to spend a fortnight with their phones switched off much earlier.
It’s not the workload getting folk. It’s the depressingly cyclical nature of it.
It seems like we can’t go a year without someone wanting to take something back which didn’t belong to them in the first place.
Scotland; the Labour Party; Britain.
Ideological zealots have spent so much time gazing at their navel they are in danger of choking on their own fluff. Yet they are shaping the current political narrative.
It tends to revolve around votes on how the country should be run, rather than actually doing anything to make things better.
Referenda; elections; referendum reruns; snap elections.
I can’t be the only one getting tired of rhetoric and yearning for something of value to actually happen.
Scotland has been in campaigning mode since 2011.
It started with the Holyrood election of that year, carried on as a slow build into the crescendo that was the independence referendum, exploded into a ball of heat for the general election eight months later, continued as we had May’s Scottish Parliament vote, then, finally, there was the Brexit ballot.
So what is the response?
Calls for a second independence referendum; a snap general election; a rerun of the EU referendum.
As if any of these will make the fundamental problems we face in society – in Scotland and across the UK as a whole – go away.
North and south of the border many are consumed by narrow nationalism.
An insular, introverted obsession with a manufactured identity which doesn’t exist and never really has.
This is not a criticism aimed at all people who want Scottish independence, or believe the vote to leave the EU was the best thing for the UK.
Far from it. Many of these people genuinely strive for improvement.
I have little doubt Nicola Sturgeon, for example, would rather be thinking about reforming Scotland’s education sector than running around Europe.
But she’s not. She’s trying to placate her rabid party members who are screaming for another referendum.
I’m tired of campaigning, I’m tired of marches, I’m tired of pointless protests which do nothing to enhance, change or benefit those in society who need it most.
The spirit of London 2012 has evaporated and that is incredibly sad.
