The best graffiti I ever saw was on the back of a toilet door in Edinburgh University library. I was sitting, cold porcelain against my back, enjoying what seemed to be a long-running nationalistic feud. It was written in biro, in a neat, almost girlish hand, amid a series of barely-legible scrawls about Southern snobbery and Northern heart disease. “Scottish people,” it said, “are poor and stupid.”

It stirs an impotent rage in me even now. Maximum respect, though, for clarity. Are English public schoolboys actually tutored in the art of flicking their moistened towels at the exposed rump of the Scottish inferiority complex? Or does it just come naturally? My pen was back on my desk but I remember sitting awhile, elbows upon knees, trying to think of some sort of patriotic rejoinder. It couldn't be done. The inverse disdain is so much more flailing. It doesn't boil down.

I have often wondered how much of the casual anti-English xenophobia rife in Scotland could be traced directly to a relatively small number of the English students who arrive at the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews each year. They are obviously a minority, even among their own countrymen, but they do make a lot of noise. They're rich, too, with their New Town flats and their expensive, debt-free clubbing. Ten years ago, the men used to wear red jeans and turn their collars up and have highlights in their hair. Maybe they still do. It frightens people. “I don't understand!” I remember one friend wailing. “Why do they dress like their own mothers?”

I lived in England at the time, as I do today, and I remember trying to explain to Scottish friends that this was just a weird little subculture. Most of this lot are pretending, I would say. England isn't really like that. Think of expats in Kenya drinking gin and tonic, or you, when you wear a kilt in Barcelona. It's all a pose.

My friends would shake their heads, savagely. “You see them on the telly,” they maintained, “at Wimbledon and the rugby.” Same thing, I'd say. Group identity. Make believe, trust me. You don't really hate people from England. You just hate people from Fulham.

They weren't convinced. After a while, animosity is infectious. So we would glower across the pub at the rainbow Hooray Henrys bellowing by the pool table, and we would sip, grimly, at our pints of Seventy. Nursing our wrath to keep it warm.

Game lad

The fans have learnt to love Andy Murray. It seems a bigger deal, however, that Andy Murray has learnt to love the fans. Remember, this is a man who said that he was supporting “anyone but England” in the 2006 World Cup, and seemed genuinely baffled at the furore that it caused. This will have been the England he was talking about, this chino-clad land where everybody is rich, and everybody talks like Prince Harry. The people who have the final word on toilet doors.

Poor Andy Murray. He is from central Scotland. He is only 21. He'll have a hardwired response to stripy shirts and Pimm's and cheerful, reedy voices shrieking out things like “Come on, Tim”. And what do we do? We send him to Wimbledon, of all places, and actually expect him to like people. It's beyond cruel. It's inhumane.

Yet the crowd adored him when he fought Richard Gasquet, and he gave every impression of adoring them back. All those trilling cheers, all that gleefully petty Wimbledon jingoism that isn't necessarily predicated upon hating anybody. He lapped it up, as though it was his own. At one point, on the television, you could even see him smiling. Give the boy a pat on the back. He has come a long way.

Screen-saver

Speaking of televisions, how big is too big, for a flat-screen? A friend has just splashed out on a 50in, which, I suspect, may be a little on the large side. Watch it, and you feel your eyelashes shrivel. Still, I have rumbling TV envy. Mine, bought a few years ago, is a mere 32in. This was the biggest that would fit into my very small car.

Even at that size, major girlfriend negotiations were required. Now we learn that flat-screen televisions are bad for the environment. Worse even than coal power or cows, apparently due to some sort of nasty gas. I'm glad we didn't know this. Ours is a forward-thinking home, coated in ethical paint and to be cleaned only with mysterious vinegars.

Another friend hit upon a cunning strategy to persuade his wife to authorise the replacement of their vast grey plastic coffin with something slimmer. In their part of London, residential property was worth £900 per square foot. His favoured television cost £650. In real estate terms, he explained, its flatness would net them over two and a half grand. Remarkably, she bought it. So he did, too.

hugo.rifkind@thetimes.co.uk

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