Edinburgh is a mess. I don’t mean the usual anarchy of its month-long festival, with the Royal Mile packed by exhaustingly eager youngsters trying to entice you into shows that all seem to start at 1.30am in a bike shed just west of Stirling. Nor do I mean that the city, lashed with nonstop rain and strong winds over the weekend, is starting to resemble the inside of a giant car wash. (“But at least it’s worse in Glasgow!” one resident exclaims with a happy smile.) No, I am referring to the mile-long by 60ft-wide building site formerly known as Princes Street — once one of the world’s most handsome city strolls. It’s my fault, I admit, that I haven’t kept up properly with all the debates and debacles in the land of my ancestors. But when I arrived to find the New Town gridlocked with diverted cars and buses (as it will be for years), I couldn’t believe that this proud and majestic capital — acclaimed only last week as Britain’s most desirable place to live — had done this desecration to itself. And all because of one four-letter word that seems to cause apoplexy wherever it is uttered. The tram!

I suppose, from a Londoner’s point of view, it is comforting to know that whatever vast building projects we allow to run years late and millions over budget (think of Wembley Stadium, the British Library, the Jubilee Line extension), Edinburgh does its cock-ups on an even grander scale. Building a new tramline to run from the airport through the city to Leith must have seemed a good idea to someone. But it is now becoming a fiasco in the same league as the Scottish Parliament building, which cost more than ten times its original budget.

Installing the tram’s rails and platforms will set the city back £545 million. But that figure is fast rising, because as they dig up Edinburgh’s venerable streets they have no idea whether they will hit an old gas pipe, a medieval sewer or the severed victims of some ancient clan vendetta.

To make matters worse, the contractors are threatening to down tools because of an internal wrangle, so the completion date has been put back seven months to 2012. By which time Nightmare on Princes Street will have become the longest-running black comedy in Scottish history. And all this is being done to replace one perfectly adequate bus route!

Still, it’s good to know that, at the end of it, Edinburgh will be equipped with the latest 19th-century transport technology. I don’t know why its council didn’t step back even farther in history and bring back the horse-drawn omnibus. That would complement the Georgian elegance of the New Town much better. It would also be ecologically impeccable, probably go at least as fast as the tram, make a wonderful tourist attraction — and cost little more than a few thousand quid in hay each year.

You had to feel sorry for the Fringe performers busting a gut to drum up business on Edinburgh’s sodden streets. So much energy and verve; so few paying punters to go round. But even the rain couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm of 20 camp but muscular chaps who sported fetching kilts and brilliant red T-shirts that proudly proclaimed the name of their show — Okla Homo. Strait-laced Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein must be turning in their graves. I know that one of the songs in their classic musical suggests that “the farmer and the cowman should be friends”. But that friendly?

Edinburgh’s chattering classes are in one of their perennial debates — or perhaps it’s the same debate endlessly prolonged — about whether Scotland is, well, Scottish enough. It’s hard to see how much more Scottish it can get. To an outsider it seems that little gets staged in the theatres or discussed in print unless it has a Scottish angle. Even the Edinburgh International Festival — which, as its name suggests, is supposed to open a window on the wider world — accepted an extra £100,000 from the Scottish Executive this year on the condition that it included more Scots-focused culture.

Now the Scottish Qualifications Authority is under fire for resisting demands that children study at least one Scottish set-text for their Higher English exam. From Rob Roy to Trainspotting, the critics point out, Scottish literature is a rich heritage to which all youngsters should be introduced. I agree, though I wonder just how culturally chauvinistic a modern Scotland should be encouraging its youngsters to become. Surely if the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, David Lindsay, Walter Scott, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith are good enough authors (and they are), they need no government endorsement simply for being Scottish. Which is presumably why the SQA hasn’t caved in. Not yet, anyway.

More navel-gazing comes in a new book by the former First Minister, Henry McLeish. It is provocatively called Scotland — A Suitable Case for Treatment, and its thesis is that, although the country is rich in talent and potential, it is being held back because people cling to the past and are scared of embracing new ideas.

But it’s the chapter written by the psychologist Anne Ellis that has caused most fuss. She identifies the public figure who comes closest to embodying the stereotype of the “dour Scot ... doggedly determined but disgruntled”. And he is an English, Welsh and Northern Irish problem as well as a Scottish one — because his name is Gordon Brown.

Dour or not, the Scots have reason to celebrate. Apparently they discovered the New World 300 years before Columbus. It must be true because a forthcoming Scottish movie says so. The film, with the Wagnerian title of Valhalla Rising, depicts a band of 12th-century Scots and Vikings sailing off to a Crusade in the Holy Land, getting a bit lost and ending up on the East Coast of America. Whoops, only 4,000 miles off course. With navigational skills like that, they presumably all became New York taxi drivers.

Oh dear, I seem to have returned to London with some Scottish banknotes. Will anyone south of the Border — or anywhere else in the world — now accept a piece of paper on which the Royal Bank of Scotland “promises to pay the bearer on demand ten pounds sterling”?

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