I was not even a year old when England won the football World Cup in 1966. While I have no memory of the event or its aftermath, it has cast a long and dark shadow over my life ever since.
Like any Scot of my generation, the win set the tone for how we view ourselves in relation to our closest neighbours, at least in a sporting sense.
Kenneth Wolstenholme’s iconic commentary; the Queen preening in the Wembley stand, wearing her Elsie Tanner hat; the now comically-dated footage of England’s toothless midfielder, Nobby Stiles, skipping across the pitch after the match, holding the Jules Rimet trophy aloft in one hand. All provoke a visceral, Pavlovian sense of revulsion in the mind of any self-respecting Scottish fan.
We commended Denis Law for playing golf on the day of the final against West Germany. We made up derogatory songs, questioning the sexuality of Jimmy Hill. There was even an Irn Bru advert, mocking the failure of English sports commentators, for decades afterwards, to get through a single sentence, in any context, without mentioning 1966.
While other footballing nations, like Germany and Argentina, are bad losers in that they find it difficult to tolerate even the idea of failure, England are bad winners.
When England win anything, particularly in football, the London-based media like to remind us about it ad infinitum and the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish are caught in the crossfire.
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As a result, the prospect of England winning another major football competition has, for Scottish football fans like me, become a terrifying, enduring possibility like the prospect of catastrophic climate........