I am proud to be Scottish. The whisky, the bagpipes, the heather and rolling moors, the monarchs, the drunken renditions of Auld Lang Syne, the battles and heroes and shortbread and tartan – I love it. As much as I curse the tourist shops on the Royal Mile whenever I pass them (the bagpipe soundtrack wailing from the speakers outside these shops spills like tourist-sewage onto the street in my humble opinion) and cringe a wee bit when anyone refers to Bannockburn, I secretly wouldn’t want to have been born in any other country.

If I spend too long in hot climes, I get grumpy and unsettled, longing instead for the cool air of the Highlands. Perversely, I complain about the constant drizzle in Edinburgh, but would happily take coldness and dampness over balmy equatorial conditions any day. From Aberdeen’s coastal shores to the inner city maze that is Glasgow, I consider it a privilege to live in a country so diverse and culturally rich. The Tartan Army’s far-flung globe trotters are, in my personal experience, always thought of as being warm-hearted, friendly and loyal. Scots are, by and large, a popular lot.

Yet every time I fill in a graduate application or a survey for university, I always select ‘British’ as my nationality. Which is why I found the recently-released 2011 Census results to be quite surprising; 62% of Scots would instead select ‘exclusively Scottish’ and only 18% chose ‘Scottish and British’. A quick survey of my friends at university seemed to prove the converse was true, but I still find these findings a bit unsettling. Yes, I am Scottish, but I consider myself to be a part of the wider United Kingdom first and foremost.

With the vote on independence under a year away, I wonder if these results are telling. Have opinions changed since 2011? Do those who consider themselves to be exclusively Scottish also hold the attitude that Scotland should be separate from the Union? I believe that the concept of a broken Union is fundamentally flawed. I am proud to call myself British and have immense support for the achievements of the country as a whole.

The support of the Union is the glue behind modern Scotland’s successes. Without support from central Government, I daresay that many of the privileges Scots currently enjoy would be somewhat lessened. It goes without saying that the political issues surrounding the topic of independence are far more complex than my brief opinion expressed above. However, I really do hope that the option to be ‘British and Scottish’ doesn’t suddenly cease to exist as of next September.