A SENSE OF DREAD AND PRAYING FOR RAIN. ANYTHING TO KEEP THOUSANDS OF AGEING NORTHERN BIGOTS FROM HANDING JOHNSON THE REINS OF POWER.

On a late summer morning just over five years ago, I was sitting in the same chair I am sitting on now. The dawn outside was rather non descript. Mainly cloudy. Occasional shafts of half hearted sunshine. But dry and forecast to stay that way. I hadn't slept much and yet felt no tiredness. Instead I was wired. Hyped. Completely unable to settle.

The date of course was 14 September 2014. Indyref day. And as the clock on my laptop clicked to 7.00 a.m., the enormity of the moment hit me sqaure between the eyes. For the first time in over three hundred years Scotland as all of a sudden entirely sovereign. As 6.69 became 7.00, our future was absolutely in our own hands. For the first time in three long centuries we were genuinely free from London's vice like grasp.

I had done my bit. Tried my best. Surfed the great wave of 'Yes'. And now it was D Day. The moment of truth.

I opted for fresh air and walked the dogs. Someone had planted a Saltire flag. It wasn't in any kind of prominent spot. Just a hedge by the side of a barely used country road. I remember stopping to just look at it as I worked my way through a cigarette.

Would we or wouldn't we?

Well. We didn't of course. At ten o'clock we surrendered our sovereignty and a few hours later all of us on the side of 'Yes' witnessed the Clackmananshire moment.

This morning the dawn is very different. There's no point hunting around for words of my own when Wildfred Owen's words are so right.

'The poignant misery of the dawn.'

Quite. It isn't actually raining yet. But it will be. Loads. Grey December rain served up with a side dish of high winds. Thank goodness. I am hanging on to the image of a pair of elderly bigots gazing out of their rain drenched front window onto a dismal Yorkshire street. They are filled with the spirit of the Blitz, but not quite filled with enough of it to head out into the downpour to cast their votes for that nice Boris who is promising to give them their yearned for Brexit. There's no real need anyway. The Mail has been promising them a bigot fuelled landslide for weeks.

Hopefully this will be a touching scene played out in front rooms all over the country. The blessed baby boomers who never saw so much as a minute of World War Two but are convinced they did because they watched lots of Sunday afternoon films starring John Mills. They are one ones Johnson has hung his hat on. The ones he had dog whistled at. Armchair warriors fuelled by a five year old cold rage after that Pakistani family bought the house four doors down.

So let the skies open and huge curtains of stinging December rain lash the front windows of Halifax and Wakefield and Wrexham and Hull.

Christ. That's what it's come to. Praying for bad weather to keep all the ageing racists in the comfort of their homes.

I am like a reformed smoker on this front. You see, I am a Lancastrian born and bred. Once upon a time I felt proud to come from this grey corner of the planet. I grew up in the shadow of Blackburn's dark satanic mills and I was happy to framed by the Lowry world around me. Then slowly but surely everything changed. Simmering racism seeped into the dark valleys of East Lancashire like a cholera outbreak and my home turf became toxic.

Our little mixed race family made like refugees. We packed our bags and took the M6 north. To sanctuary. And we became New Scots.

I heard a journalist talking last week. His words stopped me in my in my tracks. He, like me, was a Northerner born and bred. Doncaster. The Times had sent him back to his roots to write a piece about how many of South Yorkshire's Labour leavers were about to opt for Johnson. As it happened, his trip back to his youth coincided with the floods. He came across a guy who owned a double glazing business. The guy in question had thrown open the doors of his showroom to help the victims of the floods with food, blankets, sand bags.... all the stuff a flood victim doesn't get from the state. My Times guy was impressed. Moved. Warmed by this outbreak of old school northern instincts. So he asked the window guy about it and reckoned he already knew what the answer to his question would be.

“Well lad, this is the bloody north. Tha' should know that well enough. Tha's from Donny thi'sen. It's was what us Northerners do when chips are down. We get mucked in. He help each other out. No point waiting on those Tory twats from London. We'd be waiting for bloody ever....”

That was the answer the Times guy expected. It would have been the answer I would have expected. But it was't the answer he got. Instead the window guy said this.

“You know what lad, I reckon this is the Brexit spirit.”

Christ. God help us. A bizarre madness has taken root. I still head up and down the M6 on a regular basis. To see family. To watch Liverpool. And every time I head back home, the 'Welcome to Scotland' sign at Gretna looks better every time. And every time I feel like I am leaving hostile territory for home ground. The North isn't my north any more. It feels completely alien now.

So here I am. Staring out into the grey and praying for a day's worth of Noah class rain. My future is firmly in the hands of a few hundred thousand ageing bigots in small town from Blackpool to Cleethorpes. Behind their net curtains. Reading the Daily Mail over their Cornflakes. Bitter and angry. Hating the sight of the Paki who owns the Spar shop driving around in a new Merc.

Are they about to brave the rain to put some very bad people into power? Maybe. And then what? As someone who has been blogging for many years, it is impossible not to feel a tad twitchy at the idea of Johnson and his shadowy backers calling the shots. There is a new 21^st Century thing which happens when the new breed of populist fascists get a hold of the levers of power. The first people to get the three in the morning knock on the door tend to be the bloggers! We have watched this become a familiar story from Hong Kong to the Crimea to Bahrain to Iran.

Carol and I were talking about this last night. To be honest, for me it could actually be quite a good thing. A few months in a decent Scottish jail as a martyr to the cause of 'Yes' would probably help sell a few books! However if the incarceration was more Dachau than Barlinnie, then..... Well. Yeah. I am way too old to have the soles of my given the rubber hose treatment.

Which takes me all the way back to that late summer morning and a lonely flag by the roadside. We didn't have to be here. Right now we could have been looking at events in England with detached bemusement. Right now we could have been thinking 'there but for the grace of God.......'

Instead we are in the hands of all those ageing Northern bigots.

So I hope it rains like it has never rained before.