But don’t dare say it here.Andrew Wilson represents a small, admirable faction in the SNP which believes self-determination should be founded on honesty and a willingness by Scots to accept responsibility for their own failings. It is an attractive creed, one which most nationalists in his own party detest. They have the active support of every part of establishment Scotland.True friends don’t shy away from uncomfortable truths. For that reason Mr Wilson is a more patriotic Scot than any of his critics His underlying message is right too. Scotland is a country of huge potential, most of it held back by the national desire to look for scapegoats instead of solutions.TimLckhrst aol . Twenty years ago the clap clinic at University College Hospital in London was reached by descending some anonymous outside stairs – disappearing from the sight of pedestrians walking by – and entering a gloomy basement. There you gave your card in at the desk, and then waited, seated beside your fellow sufferers in a dingy room almost devoid of magazines.

With nothing else to do, they looked at you surreptitiously, and you looked at them. Each thinking, perhaps: “I may only have urethritis, but I bet he’s got the pox, chancres and all.” You tried not to fidget. I barely shuddered as the swab was taken from deep inside something that, by rights, had no inside. It was, of course, absurd that I should be continually re-infected, and by the same person, but this was a rite of passage – the inevitable price, if not of love, at least of experience. And my complaint was only non-specific; if it had been serious, I intuited, then somebody would have specified it.At around the same time my friend Otto (not his real name) dropped in to say that his problem was chlamydia. Neither of us had ever heard of this condition before, sounding – as it did – like a Shakespearean dukedom, just across the water from Illyria and Bithynia. Otto explained that it was not too bad for him, but could turn out nastily for women.

He too kept on being reinfected, until at last he wrote a little song, to the tune of the Marx Brothers’ “Lydia, the tattooed Lady”, which began: “Chlamydia, chlamydia, I’ll never get rid o’ yer, Chlamydia, you’re worse than rabies…”If I sound as though I was insouciant in those days, it’s because I was Insouciant and unbelievably ignorant No one wore condoms. The old adage “it’s like taking a bath in a wellington boot” was universally believed. “Johnnies” were what whores used, and then left discarded, like dead jellyfish on a beach, by the wall of the Parliament Hill Lido.In fact for every condom I used before the age of 35, another had to be discarded because I didn’t know which way round they unrolled. I was middle class, could discuss Hamlet’s character, Milton’s Satan and the political economy of Tudor England until the toast ran out in the Balliol Junior Common Room, but I didn’t know I had a prostate.What is it with sex in this country? This week there’s yet another scare on about sexual health, with one middle-range tabloid “revealing” on its front page that rates of chlamydia and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have soared, and many women face infertility and pelvic pain as a consequence. In fact this shock-horror article could have appeared at any time in the past two years. Health campaigners, doctors and government have been warning the country for some time of the “silent epidemic” (so-called because chlamydia is often symptomless) that has hit us.At the end of last year, for instance, results were published of a pilot study conducted among women in Portsmouth and on the Wirral. Tests had been offered at clinics and family planning centres One in 10 women under 25 tested positive for chlamydia.

And even allowing for a degree of self-selection in the study, that is a terrifying result. Recent figures from the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS) showed a rise in diagnoses of chlamydia from 53,221 in 1999, to 62,565 a year later.In some ways that is a success story, because at least those men and women were being treated. Thousands more weren’t, risking pelvic inflammatory disease, in turn causing long-term pelvic pain, blocked fallopian tubes, infertility and ectopic pregnancy, and – possibly – increasing the chances of miscarriage. In men, the Family Planning Association warns, “it can lead to a painful infection in the testicles and possible reduced fertility. Sometimes a form of arthritis known as Reiter’s syndrome occurs.” Did you know that?Things are just as bad in all those other little STDs that I used to think about when sitting in that grubby anteroom. Diagnoses of gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have more than doubled since 1995. Last July, the Government set out a strategy for sexual health Responses were due back just before Christmas.