In virtually no time at all we are at Caen airport heading towards the prefecture where the delegates are assembled for the first of several church services.
The highlight of the first service is the consecration of a massive bell in the middle of the Bayeux cathedral. I meet my first veteran of the day, from Southport, who asks me if I am the one who is ‘causing all the trouble’. At least he says it with a twinkle in his eye.
On the walk from the cathedral to the cemetery for the second service the townspeople clap the D-Day veterans as they march forward in the sun. It is the first of a number of moving moments.
Foolishly having turned down some factor 50, and even more foolishly with no hat on, I am baked in a warm sun at the cemetery. However, the day is enlivened by some chats with the old soldiers from around the Commonwealth who are in robust form. And all of whom have brought their headgear.
I meet John Millin, son of Piper Bill, who featured in the film The Longest Day, and whose statue adorns Sword Beach. John tells me a couple of things.
First, despite sporting a set of bagpipes he is actually no piper but had promised his dad on his deathbed that a Millin would play at the unveiling of the Sword Beach statue. So he is able to play ‘Highland Laddie’, one of his father’s tunes from D-Day, and pretty well nothing else.
He also discloses the real sequence of events on D-Day. Millin did not actually volunteer for a suicidal piping recital, but when ordered by Lord Lovat to play a tune demurred, pointing to the King’s regulations aimed at stopping the demise of pipers in active combat.
‘Ah,’ breezed Lovat, ‘that’s English war office and doesn’t apply to us Scots – so just play.’ Bravely, Piper Bill followed this direct order and, with comrades falling like flies all around him, he miraculously escaped without a scratch.
The next day they asked some captured German snipers: ‘Why didn’t you shoot the piper?’
‘He was obviously a madman,’ they replied, ‘and the Wehrmacht is not in the business of shooting lunatics.’
So, not quite as represented in the film but a cracking story. Come to think of it, rather better than in the film.
Piper Bill’s role is duly celebrated in a pretty good pageant which is the centrepiece of the French commemoration at Sword Beach. Trouble is, they start an hour and a half late and have a dozen veterans lined up to meet the various heads of state, who all insist on arriving one by one.
The prospect of our heroes surviving D-Day only to be struck down by sunstroke at the commemorative pageant is too awful to contemplate. Fortunately someone has the presence of mind to get some umbrellas for shelter, although a French TV producer keeps pinching the veterans’ water bottles because she thinks they are ruining her best shots.
While we wait I take the opportunity to have a quick word with US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is sitting just opposite me.
I start by suggesting that, given the President’s pronouncements, I might expel John from the Scottish caucus – the group in Congress that Senator Jim Webb has brought together to promote the Scottish interest.
He seems to think this suitably funny and tells me that we have a ‘big day’ coming up and that ‘it’ (presumably Obama’s statement) is ‘the least we could say’.
Things are just starting to get really interesting when Carwyn Jones comes up to get a photo and all revealing chat stops. Kerry’s last words to me are ‘Good luck’.
After Sword Beach we are back to Caen, where all heads of state take off in strict protocol order, Airforce One first. This means that the very pleasant Prince Albert of Monaco takes off before the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chief of the General Staff and me.
We board a Hercules transport plane. The trip back is rather like the closing scene of Where Eagles Dare, with the top brass, Ed, Nick, Carwyn and me, sitting with our backs to the fuselage – and me wondering who should be jettisoned first.
Back to Northolt in double quick time before Joe and I fly on to Aberdeen. The crew are good sorts and for the final leg I am in the jump seat in the cockpit. They tell me that they did most of their flying time in Afghanistan, where the Hercules was the ideal aircraft: it has near-vertical take-off with a light load. This stops bandits being able to shoot at you – which seems like a pretty unanswerable argument.
Despite the best efforts of the crew and a very rapid flight straight up the North Sea to Aberdeen, the taxiing around the airport takes time and a dash to Inverurie mart has me arriving at 10.30 p.m. – quick enough for people to see me making the effort but not in time to address the Taste of Grampian dinner.
This is a great pity, since I had intended to open my speech with the line: ‘I apologise for my late arrival but Airforce One delayed my Hercules taking off from the D-Day landings at Caen airport!’
Saturday 7 June
A day at home preparing for the 100-day sprint to the line.
I have some time to think about Cameron’s pleas to everyone and their auntie for help against independence and about some people being daft enough to respond.
After the Obama ‘intervention’ we had been wondering who else Cameron and his crew would be successful in persuading to speak against us. We’d heard reports of the Foreign Office briefing against us and we expected that all significant leaders had been asked for their view. Galling, since we pay those people’s salaries.
But my hunch is still that it is good for YES and that is what I shall certainly suggest to Andrew Marr tomorrow.
Apparently Andrew Neil is tweeting that because I am on Marr then Nicola cannot be on the Politics Show – an illustration of the double-think that is now par for the course for the BBC. Clearly if one SNP politician is on one network programme, then we have exhausted our quota for the day.
Sunday 8 June
Use the interview on Marr to launch a further challenge to the Prime Minister to debate with me directly – First Minister to Prime Minister. He won’t, of course, but that is no reason for not issuing the challenge.
Interviewed down the line from the Marcliffe Hotel, my favourite hotel in Aberdeen. Indeed it is everyone’s favourite hotel in Aberdeen.
As it happens I helped Andrew with one of his first big stories in journalism.
Wind the clock back to 1982 and I was at the heart of the SNP 79 Goup’s* industrial campaign, and British Leyland at Bathgate was in terminal trouble. I had accumulated a great deal of material on how truck models were being systematically withdrawn from Bathgate to prepare for rundown and closure.
However, from the less than dizzy heights as assistant economist of the Royal Bank of Scotland, I was hardly in a position to release it myself. My solution was to give the story to a young Scotsman journalist – Andrew – who ran a very good three-part series based on the information.
As part of the job, Andrew came into 36 St Andrew’s Square to interview me. Behind my desk I had a framed copy of the first-day cover of a magazine called Radical Scotland, which featured a cartoon illustrating a quote from historian Tom Nairn: ‘Scotland will be free when the last Church of Scotland minister is strangled by the last copy of the Sunday Post!’
The depiction of a slightly panicky and very baldy meenister was not meant to be taken seriously.
Some six years later, when I was in Westminster, one of Andrew’s great friends, the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill, interviewed me and started his profile by suggesting that I was a very unusual Royal Bank economist, since behind my desk there was a copy of a Church of Scotland minister being strangled by a newspaper!
This led the local Conservative Association in Banff and Buchan to release a press statement saying that I wished to