Did ever an election campaign as lacking in excitement as the Scottish parliamentary campaign of 2011 produce a more astonishing result? Perhaps, but I can't recall one. Nor, already, can I recall much from this election that is truly memorable apart, that is, from some of the declarations, various postcount reproductions of the new political map of Scotland, almost entirely yellow from top to bottom, and of course the overall result. From the campaign itself? One moment each for the four biggest parties is about the best I can do: Iain Gray pursued by placard-bearing protesters into a Glasgow sandwich shop; Alex Salmond imploring a Question Time audience in Liverpool not to let 'these three parties' destroy 'your National Health Service'; Tavish Scott peevishly warning the electorate that a vote for the SNP was a vote for independence (as if!); and Annabel Goldie in chocolate heaven at the Tunnock's factory in Uddingston. Also lurking in the memory vault is an image of the Greens' Patrick Harvie making a coherent case for sustainability and social justice, and the opening minute of the considerably less impressive Scottish Socialist 'helmet-heid' party political broadcast. Chuck in a few opinion polls showing voter intention drifting like snow in Dmmochter towards the SNP, and that's about it. No terrible blunder captured by an unnoticed microphone, no unforgettable rhetoric captured by any microphone, no dramatic confrontation between politicians that seems, in retrospect, to have been the turning-point, or at least the moment when everybody recognised that something big was afoot. Remember Jim Sillars vs. Bob Gillespie on 'additionality' in the 1988 Govan by-election? No? That was another political age, right enough, and, looking back from now, almost a foreign country. They did things differently there and then.