ADAY long festival of events in Edinburgh organised by the government in honour of St Andrew will re-ignite the debate on whether November 30 should be a national holiday.
Although the SNP pledged to take up the crusade led by former Falkirk MSP Dennis Canavan to have Scotland's patron saint honoured with an official day off, to date it has only gone as far as allowing civil servants to take a half day instead of time
at the traditional September weekend. But a day of festivities in Princes Street next month shows that the idea is far from dead. Both before and after the election, First Minister Alex Salmond said that it was still his intention to create a new holiday.
But if we must have a purely Scottish holiday, couldn't it be some other time than at the end of miserable November? It's hardly the time for open air festivities, considering two Hogmanay events have been cancelled in recent years and last year's St Andrew's ceilidh on the Royal Mile had to be moved indoors to the Hub at the last moment. If there is to be an extra holiday to celebrate Scottishness, why not take a leaf out of the American or French book and have it in July?
For a day of national significance there are alternatives. With Mr Salmond's much-expressed love of the monarchy, how about the anniversary of the Union of the Crowns on March 24, when it was 54F this year? Or April 6 (55F), to commemorate the Declaration of Arbroath? But what about July 22, when even in this year's rotten summer it was a reasonable 66F? The small difficulty for Nationalists is that it's the date the Articles of Union were agreed in 1706. Same problem for them with turning Mayday into a Scottish jamboree - the day in 1707 when political Union became reality.
Although most people know St Andrew is Scotland's patron saint, there is a surprising degree of ignorance surrounding the day his martyrdom is supposed to be remembered.
If anyone should be expected to get the date right, it should be the Scottish Parliament, but in a letter discussing the possibility of creating a public holiday to commemorate him last year the prospective date was mentioned twice as the non-existent November 31. Clearly a typographical error but maybe not so uncommon - a 2001 survey revealed that only 20 per cent of Scots could name the right day.
But if November 30 is to be the chosen day, most employers will not volunteer to give staff an extra day's paid leave, so which public holiday should go to accommodate it? Perhaps January 2, the extra day that Scotland enjoys at New Year, which says more about our booze culture than any willingness to get back into the swing of work with the rest of civilisation? For more than a few, it's just another day to clear the Hogmanay hangover, but how many would swap that with a dreich November day?
What a pity the day when the best of Scottish culture is truly celebrated is in the one month more dreary than November. Anyone for a holiday on January 25?
