But if you complicate that a little by coming from the northern half of Britain, well, that’s a bit different. Yes, there are many world-famous Scots — Adam Smith, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Watt and Sean Connery, to name only four. But with the exception of the last one, none of them wrapped themselves in tartan, and so they are usually associated with the broader “British” identity.

Of course, if the SNP were to have their way, then the very concept of Britishness would be abolished, and Nicola Sturgeon is adamant that this option should be put to the vote sooner rather than later. Were that to happen, then I think these figures and others would be retconned as purely “Scottish”, in much the same way that the post-Soviet states projected their modern identities into the past. Thus was the prophet Zarathustra resurrected in the late 20^th century as a Tajik national hero, for instance. Whether or not such retcons gain credence with the wider world, however, is another matter: Nikolai Gogol remains resolutely part of the Russian literary canon, despite his Ukrainian origins.

As for Scotland, I think this retconning might prove to be quite challenging, also. For instance, in more than two decades spent living outside the UK, I have found that many people are quite foggy when it comes to my homeland’s precise constitutional status. They know that it’s not part of England, but the shared parliament and royal family and currency are confusing. Despite this, awareness of Scottish symbols is high, thanks in no small part to Walter Scott cobbling together all that malarkey about clans and tartans in the 19^th century. Our whisky is also held in high regard, and many a golfer aspires to play at the Old Course in Saint Andrews. In fact, I’d say that as far as small countries go, we don’t have it too bad — we’re certainly better off than the Belgians with their waffles, Tintin books and melancholy kickboxer.

But still, as Scots are few in number and comparatively rare beyond British shores, we remain quasi-mysterious to many. So whenever Scotland has appeared in the media, or come up in conversation in the different places where I have lived, I have always found it interesting to think about what that says about my homeland, how it is perceived, and whether, after almost a decade and half of nationalist rule, those perceptions are changing.

For instance, in Moscow in the late Nineties, I learned very quickly that by far the most famous Scotsman as far as Russians were concerned was a wee Australian in blue face paint named Mel Gibson.  “Ah, Scotland,” they’d say. “Braveheart!” “Yes,” I’d say, “Braveheart.” True, members of the older generation were familiar with Robert Burns in the Soviet era translations by Samuil Marshak, and quite a few people had seen Highlander (where the Scottish guy is played by a Frenchman rather than an Australian). But overall, to be a Scot abroad then — and since — was to live in the shadow of Braveheart.

Usually I would bluff my way through discussions of the film because I hadn’t seen it, and most people found that baffling, even disappointing (“How can you not have seen Braveheart?”). I suppose it would have been easier just to watch it, but I am very good at sustaining Larry David-style points of principle over things that are inexplicable to others. I’d been taught about William Wallace as a child, but even then, I thought there was something not quite right about the myth. I think it was all that stuff about losing, and then being eviscerated while still alive — it just didn’t seem like something I wanted to aspire towards.

I was more of a Robert the Bruce kind of guy, and not just because his bones were buried in my hometown of Dunfermline. I liked how he — you know — won. Besides, yearning for the days when hairy dudes roamed the heather and had periodic fights with the English just wasn’t my bag. I preferred the bewigged intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment: a handful of brilliant individuals coming up with world changing ideas on the fringes of Europe. That seemed like a healthier model for the nation, (though, I grant you, less appealing as fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster).

However, despite the predominance of Braveheart, it wasn’t all Mel Gibson all the time. I remember discussing Dolly the Sheep. I liked to explain that Dolly had aged much faster than a sheep produced by the traditional method and was now preserved forever in the National Museum of Scotland, where she received visitors every day — our Lenin. I also tried to steer people towards Trainspotting because I felt that it captured Scottish nihilism quite well, and I had a story about Irvine Welsh renting Jean-Claude Van Damme movies from the video shop in Dunfermline which made him sound very uncool. But Trainspotting did not endure; people did not want janky Edinburgh junkies. They wanted Braveheart.

More from this author

Don't fall for Putin's enemies

By Daniel Kalder

And so it continued, for years. It was while I was living in Russia that Scotland held its referendum on devolution, but I don’t remember that catching people’s attention. It wasn’t supposed to; Labour thought that Scotland was their fiefdom and that that they would run it forever, like Moscow ran its satellite states during the Cold War.

When I moved to the US in 2006, I discovered that Braveheart also cast a long shadow over the land of the free, although Sean Connery was very popular, as was the late night chat show host Craig Ferguson, extracted to LA via Cumbernauld. One year later the SNP took power, but things were still quiet for at first, although I do remember one unusual story making it across the waves a few years later. In an early act of cultural auto-colonisation, the likes of which are now commonplace across British institutions, an MSP lodged a motion supporting the gay wedding of the little-known Canadian superhero Northstar to his partner Kyle in the Astonishing X-Men #51, published by Marvel Comics, the New York-based subsidiary of the Disney corporation. Admittedly, I read about it on a crap comics website; even so, it felt like a new development.

But the hitherto super-boring world of Scottish politics was about to change drastically. Mel Gibson’s dominance as a conversation topic for people mildly curious about where I came from was seriously challenged in 2014 when Scotland voted on whether or not to remain inside the UK. Suddenly the possible dissolution of a 300-year political union was in the headlines and, for the first time ever, the continued existence of a collective British identity seemed in doubt. Most people in the US had simply never thought about any of this before. Starting about three days before the referendum I found myself fielding all kinds of questions about independence (not that I had a say in any of it, mind, because the SNP had disenfranchised all Scots living overseas).

More from this author

What America can learn from Russia

By Daniel Kalder

A cheat sheet, rather than a detailed discussion of, say, claims about the viability of North Sea oil was all that was desired, so I didn’t discuss the issues at length. But that was fine — it was startling, and refreshing, after all this time to find that the Scotland my family lived in, and to which I regularly returned, was finally more compelling to the people I knew than Mel Gibson’s bekilted action movie.

Still more striking, however, was the mood the day after the referendum. I vividly recall going into work and feeling a strange sense of anticlimax among those who had talked to me about it. Presented with the opportunity to turn everything upside down and strike out on its own, Scotland had voted to… maintain the status quo. What lay behind this sense of disappointment, I wondered, among people who had zero skin in the game? At first I thought it was the influence of the revolutionary war — for Americans, declaring independence from the meddlesome parliament in London is ground zero for their national identity. And perhaps that was part of it; but now I wonder if it wasn’t also the shadow of Braveheart. Everyone appeared to have seen that film, they had all heard Mel’s stirring words about freedom, and here, given the chance to at long last fulfil Wallace’s dream and seize independence, a majority of Scots had turned around and politely declined to do so.

Suggested reading

Scotland's mid-life crisis

By Ruth Davidson

The referendum was a watershed moment in the global imagination, the moment at which Scotland ceased to be a nostalgic fantasy and became a modern country, a place where things sometimes happened, things that required further explanation. Now, with Nicola Sturgeon insisting on another referendum, I suspect it is only a matter of time before I find myself answering questions about Scotland’s constitutional status again. The conflict with Boris is scoring headlines even amid the raging garbage fire of America’s self-obsessed media. I’ve already discussed the hypothetical of a hard border between Scotland and England with one curious Texan.

An awareness overseas of Scotland as a place that, culturally at least, is not fully British is definitely on the rise. I’d say that’s half the battle for the SNP, but it isn’t — independence is a zero-sum game, after all. It is a change, however, and a significant one. Something else has changed, too: these days I’m more likely to be asked about Outlander than Braveheart. And I haven’t seen that, either.

So opens a rather brilliant and fun documentary on a topic that fascinates me: the ‘ideal man’. Many of my male friends — both gay and straight, have told me that masculinity is like a prison, giving them little flexibility in how to live and behave. Increasing numbers of us — whether male or female — are trying to work out what it means to be a man these days. Stereotypes are being challenged and gender roles supposedly more fluid.

In her new documentary, The Ideal Scotsman, Rachel McCormack looks specifically at Scottish masculinity. She explores the Scotsman in all his incarnations — from the ‘hard man’ of the Glasgow knife gangs, to today’s tearier version (Andy Murray, take a bow).

Suggested reading

How toxic masculinity is tied to terrorism

By Joan Smith

McCormack, a proud Glaswegian, has long been fascinated by men in kilts. I’ve seen first-hand why: I accompanied her on a trip to Edinburgh while she was researching a book on women and whisky, and witnessed how she is generally treated by the male-dominated whisky industry. She wasn’t once phased by the often outrageous sexism she was subjected to; but she did challenge it firmly and reasonably while drinking the blokes under the table.

“Public life in Scotland”, she tells me, “is overwhelmingly male and unfriendly to women.” That’s why she decided to make the film. “I wanted to see what Scottish men were doing with all the space they are taking up”. Men are 50% of the population, she says, but they dominate public life.

But is that specific to Scotland? In many ways, yes, she says. “Despite our changing political culture, Scotland is still overwhelmingly male.”

More from this author

The Yorkshire Ripper fired up my feminism

By Julie Bindel

The best-known expression of Scottish masculinity is probably that represented in the 1995 film Braveheart, a fictional tale based on the life of William Wallace, who led the Scots in the First War of Independence against King Edward I of England. The film emphasises the machismo of Wallace and juxtaposes this version of a man with the heavily homophobic depiction of the English Prince Edward and his male companion — all make-up and feminine attire. The message here is that proper Scotsmen are hard and heterosexual and have a passionate love for their country. Nationalism is what true men fight for.

McCormack wanted to see if that is still the case. She tells me she was particularly “interested in what the male is like now that there is no hard industry to shape that ‘hard man’ caricature we remember. How do they see themselves and their position as men in Scotland today?”

And so she talks to actors, historians, writers, and even a celebrated male ballet dancer. She tracks the Scottish man through time, too, starting with the Highland Chiefs and ending with Rab C. Nesbitt and the uber violent Begbie in Trainspotting.

Throughout the documentary, McCormack manages to have intelligent and meaningful conversations with both hairy-arsed geezers and the new wave types; she gets them all to really think about what it means to be a man today.

And she finds that things are changing. Tough young men such as ballet dancer Chris Harrison and writer Chris McQueer have a much healthier outlook on life. “Harrison is one of the bravest men I have ever met,” she says, “a heterosexual ballet dancer when he was growing up in rural Stirlingshire was not something that would have been allowed to exist easily and it is very obvious he had a really hard time.”

Harrison is a great interviewee. In the film he talks about how it is now much easier for Scottish boys to do ballet — but stops short of attributing that change even slightly to himself, which one undoubtedly could.

McQueer, in turn, talks about the generation of working-class men being brought up mostly by single mothers, who don’t want to be like the older generation of men. “They didn’t want to disappoint their mums and their grans,” says McCormack. “I found that really sad as it appeared the only way to cut out a toxic legacy was if the men disappeared.”

In fact, one of the most interesting things she discovered was the way sons relate to their fathers. She said she noticed a particular “emotional repression” present in many father-son relationships.

Suggested reading

Scotland's drug shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

This really resonated with me. And it isn’t peculiar to Scotland. As a feminist who has spent all her adult life campaigning to end male violence towards women — one woman is killed every three days by a former partner — I am constantly confronting the reality and repercussions of toxic masculinity. All those men who assault women are, in the main, given permission to do so by the indoctrination and perpetuation of sexist stereotypes.

Behaviours are handed down from generation to generation. Boys are bullied in order to become ‘proper men’, taught to fight, told that women should be kept in their place and are simply sex objects. On a more common — if insidious — level, the casual normalisation of gender roles in the domestic setting, such as leaving the housework and childcare to women, is far more common than many so-called ‘modern men’ would like to admit. We feminists are, in a way, a man’s best friend. We know that men can choose not to be dicks and we are fighting to tell them as much.

More from this author

There's nothing woke about the sex trade

By Julie Bindel

So it was refreshing to hear that there is a younger generation kicking back against the particularly rigid stereotype of the Scottish ‘hard man’. It is clear from both the film and from my own observations as a feminist that today, at least for the younger generation, masculinity isn’t nearly as restrictive as it was.

McCormack agrees. “It does seem to be changing dramatically,” she says. “The younger generation seem in a much better position to cope with life, like women and have a more pleasurable life.”

Thankfully, the stereotype of the Scottish man is shifting from that of Rab C. Nesbitt — the angry, lazy, middle-aged man with stubble and in a dirty string vest — to the point where male ballet dancers and pro-feminist sportsmen such as Andy Murray can get a look in.

Which isn’t to say that my work is done. When instances of male violence against women and other men falls to a record low; when fewer boys look to hard-core pornography for their sex education, and a few more of them pick up a vacuum cleaner and nappy every now and again — maybe then we will be able to feel assured that toxic masculinity is becoming obsolete. But until then, it is alive and, unfortunately, kicking hard.

The Ideal Scotsman can be watched on iPlayer.