KEY POINTS:
HUNTLY - There is a smell, distant but weighty, of cow muck. Haggis is growing dry and black after three hours under hot lights, and remains about the healthiest thing on the cafe menu. Alex Salmond is being smug.
These are three things unchanged about Scotland since, it
seems, about 1707, but more probably just in living memory. These are, astonishingly, about the last three things unchanged about Scotland.
On Friday, the country will vote for the third Scottish Parliament since former Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar and Prime Minister Tony Blair wrangled and parlayed and, with a (very Scottish, very lawyerly) compromise of lifelong passion and bloodless pragmatism, introduced devolution in 1999.
Labour has had eight years north of the border to convince the people that that was as far as they wanted to go, to convince their heartland that their best interests lay in those devolved powers and none further; in a soft, fluid border and a firm hand from Westminster.
They have failed. The border, slow epoxy, is setting. Every indication, every poll, is that the Scottish National Party has a convincing, unassailable lead, and that Salmond will form a coalition with Nicol Stephen's Liberal Democrats and become First Minister: and, in 2010, in keeping with his manifesto, take the country into a referendum vote for independence.
It's a long way away. Most Scots don't, at the moment, want it. But most Scots don't either, at the moment, want the Labour Party.
The reason for this is not the man sitting before me, in the cafe of the Huntly farmers' market, but down in Westminster, searching with tweezers for his legacy. Nevertheless, Salmond is the undoubted beneficiary. He is trying not to look smug. It must be terribly hard, but he's trying.
He won't accept, quite, that this election has not been so much won by the SNP as lost by Labour, but he admits the stances were crucial.
"They fought on fear. We fought on hope. It was a crucial misjudgment."
Crucial doesn't begin to go there. Everywhere I go there are two themes, from long-term SNP voters and swaying disillusioned Labour ones alike: anger at Blair over Iraq, and resentment of Blair, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and Westminster for having taken Scotland for granted, and told them devolution was quite enough, and offered them no more.
The latest YouGov survey shows the SNP is on track to win 47 seats in the 129-seat Scottish Parliament, seven more than Labour. The Liberal Democrats would have 18 MSPs, the Conservatives 18, the Greens five and other parties one.
"Paternal" was a word I heard a lot, in Edinburgh and Dundee, and in Huntly in the northeast and "patronising". Talking politics outside one of the many pubs in Edinburgh's Royal Mile, the overwhelming consensus is that Blair and, to an extent, Brown, forgot a major part of the Scottish psyche.
"We might know they're right. But we don't like being told so."
It is, says Salmond when I put it to him, "a good phrase, and you're probably right. The patronising we-know-best attitude of Labour has gone down astonishingly badly". The Labour Party, for instance, put on its website a cartoon mocking "Little Alex" as a schoolboy failing to understand his sums. Salmond is the former oil economist for the Royal Bank of Scotland. Patronising doesn't come close.
He could, on a good day, eat Brown for breakfast. Pitting him against Jack McConnell, the Scottish First Minister, has been an act of wanton cruelty. Salmond, it's fair to say, doesn't suffer fools gladly, and McConnell he has suffered less gladly than most.
McConnell has done his best, and those struggling to talk him up can find many good things to say about wide achievements in the eight years - the smoking ban, pushed through to surprising success and acceptance, and integration of immigrants.
"I've tried to be positive, all the time, see the good that can come out of simply letting Scotland choose, letting Scots have their say, trusting Scots. Asking them, not telling them, to take the chance of seeing the SNP, now, in action."
Labour's attitude has turned out to be absolutely, precisely the wrong one, the lowering brow of the dominie talking to the children of fear and gloom.
Scotland has changed enormously. In Edinburgh, there are parts which more closely resemble Seattle, sunny wi-fi mochaccino cafes in the High Street where once ordure was hurled daily from the tenement windows, and a headquarters for the Royal Bank of Scotland which looks daily more like that of Microsoft.
In Dundee, where just 20 years ago the al fresco option of choice was a temazepam sandwich, there are pretty girls in rimless glasses, who write the world's computer games for a living, swapping dried apricots.
Art, music, architecture, universities, jobs, thrive; and those old friends I speak to talk of a new mood: a celebration of the adaptability of the nation and feeling that "we can pretty much do anything".
Much of old Scotland, the cringeworthy stereotypes, is truly dead now. The SNP has been first to embrace the new mood of change and hope, and thus to escape its own clogging '50s image, the knock-kneed nationalist with his jaggy bonnet and his grievances, dram in hand, singing the old songs, talking of the future but dreaming only of the past.
The most savage irony is that Labour could have claimed much credit for this renaissance, a renaissance missed by many. New to me, and exciting to find, and hard to date: Salmond, despite opposing the phenomenal overspend at the time, places it roughly to the completion of the Scottish Parliament.
"Suddenly, you know, it was just there. It was up. I think it changed things. Scotland is really believing in herself. At the end of World War II, 10 per cent of this country defined itself as Scottish rather than British. Fifty years later, the figure has gone to 80, 90 per cent. And it is a healthy, healthy belief."
Against this, Labour somehow managed to insult its natural homeland - for that is what it is, and can be again. One of the few other things not to have changed up here is the dislike of the Conservatives.
Salmond is a strange character, given all the fine words and passion exhausted in 300 years and more to the idea of a nation-state, to be the man finally leading the way, swaggering the first steps of the path.
An irony too in what the world will now see of Scotland, will be, in its next First Minister and in the person of Greatest Living Scotsman Sean Connery, two men who have somehow raised gracelessness to an art form.
Of all the proud quotations etched in stone outside the glorious new Parliament building, the one that strikes as most apt is not from a king, or a poet, or a politician, or a warrior-prince, but the Glasgow architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
"There is hope in honest error. None in the icy perfection of the mere stylist."
Scotland will vote this week and may make an honest error. But it will, this time, be theirs. Of that they are self-determined.
- OBSERVER
