Dani Garavelli

Katie Allan’s suicide forced Scotland to examine its conscience because she was grievable. She was middle class, white and pretty, a university student who had made one huge mistake – it was easy for people to feel sympathy for her. But her death made a difference because her family believed that children like William Lindsay, who had a very different upbringing and experience of the justice system, were grievable too.

The Broadway cinema in Prestwick closed in 1966. It was converted into a bingo hall, then a squash court and amusement arcade. I spent hours pushing coins into the penny falls, until in 1984, the year I turned seventeen and UK cinema attendances hit rock bottom, I moved to Glasgow. But my mother still lives in Prestwick, so I noticed when posters went up on the disused Broadway building, charting attempts to restore it as a working cinema.

If ‘hope’ was the buzzword in 2015, today it’s ‘scunnered’. Even those who support independence seem too tired to talk about it, or perhaps are just resigned to it not happening any time soon. ‘Each party picks up the last one’s shit and no one can clean it up,’ one former SNP voter told me.

I know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War of Independence. I know it was 152 feet long, weighed 998 tonnes and carried 42 guns. But at the time this replica was created in 1975, I knew only that it was my dad’s obsession.