Mile widziany wobec Szkocja!

This runs the risk of sounding incredibly patronising, but for reasons I can't fully explain, I find the presence of lots of new Polish immigrants in Edinburgh enormously uplifting. Part of it is just that they all seem so pleasant and another part is the fact that I find the emerging Polish barbers and food shops terribly cosmopolitan, as though Leith had been transposed to the set of Friends.

Most of all though I get the strangest feeling of living through history from seeing young Polish men and women working around town. Like the influx of afro-caribbean and asian immigrants in the post-war years, the vast majority of new Polish arrivals have come here to make a better life for themselves and provide a more hopeful future for their children. Perhaps this strikes me even more forcefully because - and how odd is this? - I'm older than pretty much all of these people, but it definitely does give me a degree of hope for the future because I know for a fact that the children of these adopted Scots will be actual Scots, only with a Polish twist, and I prefer to see the world becoming more homogenous than less.

Finally, it fills me with what is probably an out-dated sense of pride that they've chosen the United Kingdom to come to and that, so far as I've been able to see, the British have welcomed them wholeheartedly.

Scotland is an insular and grey little place much of the time, but it's great to see our horizons open just a tiny bit, with the promise of brighter days to come.