FED up being stuck at home with your family? Have you now got to the stage where you're finishing one another's sentences with "for God's sake will you just shut up?" and wishing that the pub was open so that you could go and drown your sorrows? Well that's because you're not one of the elites.
You're not at all like Douglas Ross. Douglas is swanning off to Luxembourg free of any quarantine rules because he's - checks notes - an elite sportsman.
Still, at least this time he's not missing a national commemoration service like he did when he decided that he'd rather indulge his paid hobby and buggered off to be a linesman at a Kilmarnock vs St Johnstone match instead of attending a VJ commemoration service in Forres in August this year.
READ MORE: Douglas Ross exempt from 14-day quarantine after Luxembourg-Cyprus clash
Luxembourg is on the list of countries for which a 14-day quarantine is mandatory when a traveller arrives in Scotland. However there are exemptions for people who are working at elite sporting events and for film and TV crew. Douglas qualifies for an exemption because he'll be a linesman at a UEFA nations match due to be held in the Luxembourg national stadium.
Ross will officiate at the match as part of his third job after being a full-time MP and a full-time sock puppet for Baroness Ruth Don't Call Me Baroness Davidson, the shortly to be unelected and unaccountable member of the Lords where she'll be spared the bother of having to come up with an excuse for avoiding her constituents.
Ross has promised that he'll give up his linesman gig if he becomes the first minister. The SFA are rumoured to be very relieved at the realisation that they're going to enjoy his services for many decades to come. Ross is a proud member of that doughty band of referees, the only job in the world which attracts greater public oppobrium than being a Scottish apologist for Boris Johnson. Although he's not actually a proper referee, which is appropriate as he's not actually in charge of a proper political party. He's just a linesman of politics, and takes his lead from his bosses in Westminster.
Being a referee is the only thing that anyone knows about Douglas. Well, that plus the fact that he says that he's going to stand up for Scotland's interests but those interests always turn out to be exactly the same as whatever insult to the collective Caledonian intelligence Dominic Cummings has planned for us this week.
Neither of those are things which are likely to endear him to anyone outside that small group of people who shop their neighbours to the polis because they put out the recycling bins on the wrong day but who are quite convinced that they themselves should be allowed to burn an old sofa in the street. Rules, like quarantine restrictions, are for the little people, and a burning sofa is what passes for the Conservative Party these days.
Ross has decided to ditch some of the Tories' nastier policies in Scotland. Following a decade of insisting that making students get into debt is actually to do them a huge favour, Douglas has done a U-turn and is now in favour of the Scottish tradition of free university education. He's done this on the basis that he can say and do pretty much anything, safe in the knowledge that he's got as much chance of becoming first minister as there is of Ruth Davidson being available for an interview whenever Boris Johnson has been a public embarrassment again.
It has been said of fitba referees that they know the rules, but they don't know the game. That pretty much sums up Douglas's career in politics too. Politics is about telling stories, about presenting images. It's about showing people that you're on their side. It's not about laying down the law and telling the people of Scotland what the rules are.
We are the people, we set the rules. It's not for the Tories to tell us that we must abide by a supposed promise made by a politician in another party. Yet that's precisely what the Tories are currently trying to do. They're trying to bind the Scottish people to a promise that they say that Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon made in 2014 about a "once in a generation referendum". But even if they did make such a solmen vow, so what. That's not how the game of politics works. The Scottish Tories don't grasp that and cannot grasp it because they are bound to follow the instructions laid down by Westminster. The Tories are the absolute last people to be lecturing anyone about keeping a vow.
No one applauds a referee Douglas. And no one even notices the referee's assistant because we all know that he's not the guy in charge. Douglas will join the long and ever lengthening list of "Saviours of the Union" who couldn't even save their own careers. Still, at least then he'll have plenty of time for being an assistant referee.
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