Valentine’s Day is the most curious of scams. Couples that don’t know how to spread their love evenly and spontaneously throughout the year instead fall into the ‘Cards Galore’ trap and shower their one and only with the same cards, teddy bears and chocolates that people up and down the country are also purchasing. Rows upon rows of tables-for-two in restaurant after restaurant, synchronised staring into those special someones’ eyes. Are they one in a million or just another sucker trying to quantify their feelings with £££ signs?

Anyway, relationships exist not just within the narrow, shallow parameters of Valentine’s Day that I snort my derision at (and will pay a heavy price for later! (not really)). A relationship exists between public and Government. Honeymoon periods move on to ‘it’s complicated’ until suddenly you’re living completely separate lives just waiting for the next smiling buffoon promising the earth to come along.

We don’t help ourselves either. How many couples have a long comfortable time together, break up, go their separate ways for a while and then the pangs hit, realisation sets in and before you know it you are back together for good. It seems to be part of human nature. We quibble, we nitpick, we pontificate as the three or four year itch strikes, despite the person in front of us being quite simply, and unromantically realistically, as good as it gets.

We wonder if this really is the one despite them ticking all the boxes and allow ourselves to look elsewhere, the demons teetering us closer to the tantalising prospect of someone new, or maybe someone old, the calmer, sensible angels roughly pushed to one side. We panic, go back to our old love, what we know, what we’ve always known, that relationship that became so tired and lacking in passion but we know it, it’s easy and that counts for something, somehow.

And sometimes in love and politics you have to be burned twice before you know where you stand and who you should be standing with. In following its heart rather than its head with Labour, will Scotland be putting its fingers into the fire when deep down we should really know better?

I can’t imagine Alex Salmond wants roses or cards or teddy bears or chocolate. Ok, he might want the chocolate but he will want us to think what these past four years have meant. Would you trade them in if you could?

Remember saving the A&E departments? Remembering scrapping tolls? Remember the first Council Tax freeze? That was a good day. Oh, remember James MacFadden’s wonder goal against France?

Acht, well, whatever you decide to do, we’ll always have Paris.