When I was but a wee lad, my parents would regularly take me to visit family friends in St John. Those were the days when stately, but draughty, JMT dinosaurs would wheeze you up Queen’s Road recovering with a splutter as they passed the brick-works.

But the order before we set out from St Clement was ‘Take a cardigan – it’ll be cold up there’. That wasn’t the only difference, of course. There was enough Jèrrias spoken in the countryside in those days to make it an adventure, and even to our youthful ears, they did speak English with a ‘funny’ accent.

But we were on the same time zone, used the same pounds, shillings and pence and, to the best of everyone’s ability, drove on the same side of the road. It never occurred to my small brain that the agricultural wealth of the Island was pretty well concentrated north of a line stretching from St Ouen’s Pond to Gorey Pier. Do you see where I’m leading?

Last week saw a somewhat arch encounter between David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Alex Salmond, the avuncular neo-chieftain driven by a personal crusade for independence north of the barrier defined by the Romans two thousand years ago.

The First Minister’s argument centres on his contention that Scottish wealth, such as it is, should be reserved for Scottish folk. Some among the Westminster chattering scribes feel that Mr Cameron has been bushwhacked by the wily SDP leader, who has made all the running while the PM has been preoccupied with the more weighty matters of preserving the nation’s overall economy and international standing.

Poke fun at Salmond’s pomposity if you may, but there’s a whole lot more riding on the issue than political name-calling. The very possibility of fracturing the Union bears huge responsibility which could spell disaster for decades to come on both sides of the ‘border’.

There are recent examples where a national split has made sense – the Czech Republic and Slovakia, for example, who really didn’t get on. Their independence represented a clean break between equals, not appeasement of an avaricious regional irritant.

There are others, such as Yugoslavia, where the break-up of a national federation was nothing short of a catastrophe. Yet, there will always be the chance for opportunists to whip up national fervour whenever there’s a score to be settled or economic advantage to be gained. But it is high risk.

From New Testament scriptures onwards, the concept that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’, is etched in literature. For ‘family’, one can read ‘kingdom’ or, the Abraham Lincoln version, ‘nation’ – which is about the same as saying the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Historically, nation states have bound themselves together for mutual protection, ethnic or cultural hegemony, and have grown into leading powers with influence way above their weight. Perversely, it is only when they have achieved dominance that they can afford the indulgence of ‘cherry-picking’ relationships.

At which point – and this is the obvious context now faced on the UK mainland, small-minded nationalistic aspirants have over-indulged on the opiate of devolution and confused the issue with full independence. So we have been presented with this exceedingly ugly phrase ‘devo-max’, which effectively allows the rebellious children to enjoy the toys in the playground confident that their nannies and erstwhile siblings will wipe their noses and keep the big kids at bay.

This is not Independence. Independence is standing on your own two feet. For a country, it means paying your own bills, operating your own currency, economy, political system, taxation, defence, laws, education, health care, border controls – the list goes on: all the things that underpin a viable state which were previously provided by the very fact of being part of a union.

It’s a realisation which may even have stilled similar expressions of interest on our own self-contained rock. In the case of Scotland, the ludicrous political ‘playtime’ whereby Scottish MPs sitting at Westminster can meddle in English affairs, while there is no reciprocal English voice at Holyrood – the so-called West Lothian question – could not possibly survive. Issues such as determining what is ‘our oil’ or ‘our fish’ – let alone de-coupling laws and regulations would cause years of administrative chaos and cost millions.

There are suggestions that the desire to stage a referendum on the question of independence to coincide with the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn in 2014 – a rare victory for the Scots at a time when the entire mainland was ravaged by pointless territorial disputes – is a calculated piece of theatre designed to humiliate the traditional enemy once more. But, what is the endgame?

It would hardly be a worthy contemporary trophy if it were to result in the instigator going down in history as the man who destroyed the Union and left its remnants teetering on the edge of Europe with reduced clout in the EU and minimal influence at the UN.

But, is it not all academic anyway? Surely the tribes of the north are bound by the 1707 Act of Union just as securely as our local ancestors pledged us to the Oath of Association in 1696. In a year which will focus on two major events likely to cement the union: namely, the longevity of Sovereign and the Monarchy which has straddled the border for centuries, and the integrity of ‘Team GB’ in the Olympics staged on home soil, secessionist distractions are both tedious and destabilising.

And rather than be led by the nose, doesn’t the British Prime Minister with the Scottish surname have the power just to say ‘No’?