WHAT has happened to me? On my desk yesterday was an intriguing package. From the States. (Almost £40 in postage). Inside was a football shirt. An Adidas Scotland shirt to be more precise and on the back the word PINK, which I’m guessing is a promotional device heralding the singer’s show at Hampden in June next year.

Now, for some reason I felt offended. Not by the cheeky Pink promo idea, but by the fact someone had imagined me wearing a Scotland shirt. And that set the mind into a quandary. I still have pics of me as a seven year-old wearing a Scotland shirt, imagining myself to be a young Baxter (Jim, not Stanley) or a dark-haired Jinky. I wore this soft cotton classic to bed. I wore it until it demanded it be boil washed in Lux. I wore this shirt until my skinny little frame produced enough content to stretch its seams to breaking point.

My Scotland shirt connection didn’t end there. In my late teens and early twenties I wore one to Wembley. To Hampden. On holiday. But right now I feel I’d rather wear lederhosen and a sparkly boob tube. The idea of pulling on a Scotland jersey simply seems wrong.

Why this disconnect? It doesn’t apply to all cultural forms. I still think Lulu to be the greatest white soul singer ever (better than Dusty) and love Gerry Rafferty, and Scots comedy and Still Game. Could it be that the football of late (of very late) hasn’t been great? Perhaps. But being destroyed by Israel wasn’t a surprise; what would have been a surprise was the score line being reversed.

Has this rejection of the jersey something to to with the growth of Nationalism? A friend who’s not a Nationalist is now talking of voting for independence when Ref 2 is called, on the basis of feeling aggrieved that Scotland is being Brexited. As it happens, I’m with this sentiment. But where we part company is this sense of injustice is not the loudest voice in my head. The voice screaming out is one of worry for the future, for the children who have to grow up in this little indie world which exists without a thought-out economic plan.

Could my not pulling on the jersey be down to the fact the SNP won’t reveal a strategy for containing multinational tax dodging, supporting the ailing NHS or determining who will build schools? If I slip on the Scotland jersey am I shedding the warm vest that has been the Barnett Formula?

What’s inarguable is we are now a divided, self-centred little nation. In movie imagery terms on the one side are the Brigadooners, (who are also European Brigadooners), and The Debt Collectors, who believe there is ultimately a price to pay for living on little more than a dream.

Meantime, we live in a Scotland in which we are constantly being dabbed with the calamine lotion of liberal policy. Last week, Scotland “declared war on hate crimes,” a statement so nebulous you’d need an astro telescope to work out any form of fine line detail. So much of our government’s policy is displacement activity. And much of it, as my colleague Iain MacWhirter pointed out this week, not well thought out, such as the anti-sectarian bill.

The fear of the shirt may also be the fear of the economic cliques the country has encouraged and will continue to grow.

It’s a worry, for example, over Creative Scotland, reflected in the hapless judgements of last year, or Scottish Enterprise and a claimed £100m lost in failed businesses in the past decade.

But perhaps the fear of the new Adidas jumper reflects a changing national identity.

We’ve kept our dark, cheeky aggression, but lost our sense of community, our support systems, our “take your turn of the stairs” mentality.

There are deeper thoughts emerging about being part of Team Scotland. There’s the worry London mayor Sadiq Khan may be right when he connects nationalism with racism. There’s a concern that when hermetic Nationalists valorise Scotland and demand separation from England it implies that England is somehow less. If we care about social justice and egalitarianism why does it need to stop at Carlisle?

This somehow sits at odds with the times of those early Scotland strips being worn when the essence of being Scottish was summed up by someone such as Jimmy Reid. Perhaps the Scotland jersey was headed for the recycle bank bin when Tommy Sheridan ended up on Big Brother and Alex Salmond on Russia Today.

Perhaps the Brigadoon mist cleared with new understandings of what Scotland is about. It’s a knowing of the part we played in the slave trade, that Robert Louis Stevenson created the world view of shortbread tin Scotland, and that in fact he wrote of darker duality of his home nation in the likes of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped, that Scotland has long been at war with itself, reflected in aspiration and sometimes sheer greed.

Perhaps that’s why I can’t see me pulling on that Scotland jersey anytime soon. Although if we do qualify for the Euro Championships that the mindset may shift a little.