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Good morning, One wintry night in 1972, I was sitting on the top deck of a number 38 London bus heading towards Balls Pond Road. A fellow countryman, clearly the worse for wear, stood up at the front and began to assail the passengers with a litany of questions to which he also gave the answers: Who was it who gave you yer steam engine? A Scotsman! Who was it who have you yer telephone? A Scotsman! Who was it who gave you yer television? A Scotsman! Who was it who gave you yer penicillin? A Scotsman! And then, as he was catching his breath, a voice from behind called out, 'And who was it who gave you your whisky?'..to which everyone on the upper deck chorussed, ' A Scotsman!' This is St. Andrew's Day, Scotland's patronal festival when, pray God, few of us will visit that kind of interrogation on others. Far from educating Londoners, the man on the bus was displaying both ignorance and prejudice, maybe because fifty years ago, as a nation, we had a low self-esteem. We actually didn't know much about ourselves. Despite studying history at school, I was unaware that we became part of the United Kingdom largely because our attempt at colonising Panama bankrupt the nation and we had to bailed out by England.. Nor did I know that Scotland had freely participated in the slave trade. At one time we owned a third of the plantations in Jamaica. Nor was I made aware that in the 19th century lowland bailiffs were used by absentee landlords to evict Gaelic-speaking crofters from their ancestral lands and send them on ships across the Atlantic. But I also didn't know that in the 13th century we had, in Duns Scotus, a theologian the stature of Thomas Aquinas, in the 16th century we in had Robert Carver, a composer as skilled and prolific as Palestrina, and in the 19th century we had a diaspora of entrepreneurs scattered across every continent. So, in the absence of a bigger picture, it was easier to develop a negative, partisan mentality which made us proud that we were not English, and we were not posh. One of my favourite lines in the Gospel is where Jesus condenses his ethical teaching into a simple maxim: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. There is no aspect of life in which that truism fails to liberate - and most certainly when it comes to dealing with our prejudices, our ignorance and our fallible self-esteem.