In came a text:  "I saw a blackbird and a magpie, arguing."

"So I said, ah that will be the old yes/no (referendum) vote – apparently the blackbirds are voting 'No'," MacAulay says.

Just a little throwaway radio line for a sunny morning.

The next day an email arrived at the station.

"Dear BBC Scotland. On the Today show, Fred MacAulay said he had heard blackbirds would be voting 'No'. He did not balance this with any birds who are voting 'Yes', which would have given the matter a lighthearted balance.

"Instead we were treated once again to a BBC giving advantage and support for the Better Together [No] campaign. It's not good enough and it has to stop."

MacAulay just shakes his head as he retells this story at his Edinburgh Fringe stand-up show. "We are splitting ourselves," MacAulay says.

Come September 19, the morning after the referendum on whether Scotland should leave the United Kingdom, there's going to have to be some serious bridge building – no matter who wins.

At the moment, the result is looking like 'close but no cigar' for Scotland's independence campaign. The polls have the Yes vote rising steadily - but slowly. The undecided are mostly breaking for Yes, but so far not in quite the numbers needed to carry the day. There are only a few percentage points in it, but just enough to predict a No, says the conventional wisdom.

Not only the polls, but also the odds tell against independence. This week online you can get 5-1 betting on Yes. Bet on No and you'd have to wager £7 ($12.50) to get one more back.

But try and tell that to Angus Robertson. He is one of the Scottish National Party's Westminster MPs, and director of their Yes campaign.

The Wimbledon-born son of a German mother, he grew up in Edinburgh and now represents Moray, an electorate that takes in bits of the Scottish Highlands, a whole lot of trout fishing, Walkers Shortbread, Baxters Soup and more than half of Scotland's whisky distilleries.

It's raining outside his Edinburgh office when I come in to meet him. Cold and raining. In August. I park my umbrella next to the piles of 'Yes' stickers and posters and badges, and settle in for a friendly hour of spin.

"We are well-positioned to close the gap," he says, calmly, leaning back in his chair. "I'm not certain that the commercial opinion polls are adequately capturing the undecided … when we are knocking on doors, which we do in larger numbers than the pollsters, we are identifying a significantly larger proportion of the electorate that still hasn't made up its mind."

They are disproportionately women, he says.

And he shows me the latest publicity material that his team has popped through Scottish letterboxes, a pamphlet whose cover features a happy middle-aged lady holding her baby grandchild.

Childcare, the cover promises. Pensions. Jobs. The vignette stories inside feature a mother 'shocked' by the cost of childcare imposed by Westminster, a young woman who wants to be a doctor and rails against tertiary education fees, a daughter, mother and grandmother all "very positive about an independent Scotland", and Carole Inglis, owner of the Isle of Skye Fudge Company, who wants more tourism and broadband internet.

This is one of the Yes campaign's hopes – that women make up their minds more slowly, but are ultimately more amenable to the pro-independence arguments and the idea of Scotland as a Scandinavian-style social democracy.

"Knowing they have that time [to decide], they will use that time," Robertson says. "And we can use this time constructively, we know exactly who we have to talk to."

There is a school of thought that the nationalist cause is a hairy-chested, aggressive turn-off for women – a perception that has not been helped by the trollish behaviour of the so-called 'CyberNats' on social media. But Robertson points out that women voted for the SNP in equal numbers to men in the last Scottish elections. He professes not to be worried.

The Yes campaign's efforts are now concentrated on those they have identified as 'reachable'.

"The aim of the campaign has always been for a groundswell of opinion to build near polling day," Robertson says. There are teams out in every town and village and city, holding public meetings, knocking on doors, encouraging the formation of groups such as 'Business for Scotland' or 'Trade Unionists for Yes', 'Taxi Drivers for Yes', 'Hearts/Hibs [rival Edinburgh football clubs] fans for Yes', even 'Architects for Yes'.

Architect Malcolm Fraser is from the latter group, which emerged in the last week. Fraser sees a genuine interest for Scottish architects in breaking off from Westminster and the black hole gravitational pull of the English capital.

"It feels that, in today's Britain, my primary responsibility as an architect is to serve Big Business, and that the best I can aspire to is to build big, aggressive towers in London," he told the Building Design website. His group has a healthy dollop of self-interest – they predict a building boom if Scotland becomes its own country.

"One of the huge differences is the differences in the campaigns," Robertson says. "The Yes side is grassroots and normal people and activism and enthusiasm and optimism and democracy and hope and thinking about a better future. The No campaign is air war and money from vested interests and very few activists on the ground and very little activity on the streets."

I ask him if this broad coalition of 'left-handed tree surgeons for Yes'-type groups is really a winning tactic.

"Absolutely," he replies. "One person at a time."

To Australians used to compulsory voting, the tactics of a voluntary system can be bewildering.

There are the 'differentials' – it's not just about what proportion of the electorate fall on each side of the question, it's about how motivated each side will be to actually turn up and vote.

Robertson says his campaign's grassroots campaign gives them an advantage on referendum day (and one invisible to the pollsters until then): an army of activists roaming the streets, urging on those they have identified as Yes voters, or the undecided they think they can infect with the day's excitement.

"There is going to be an incredible sense of history about what happens," Robertson says.

He argues that, on the day, a positive message will be a better one to motivate voters.

"Our case is one based on optimism, on a better future, on a belief that we can make better decisions that can improve people's lives.

"The other side … has been investing heavily on a fear agenda. They themselves have understood their job as making people uncertain. But that presupposes that people are stupid."

But enough of the spin. If you want to know what's really going on, ask a comedian.

Down at the Assembly Rooms, Vladimir McTavish and Keir McAllister are presenting a show that has been touring the country since the start of the year –  Aye Right? How No? The Comedy Countdown to the Referendum.

It's not exactly cerebral comedy – a lot of their early material is '[Scottish First Minister] Alex Salmond is fat' jokes. But they have a nice line on JK Rowling's £1 million donation to the Better Together campaign – "so she dreamt up a magical kingdom where ginger kids get the girl, but she can't imagine an independent Scotland?"

And they hit their stride when they start to run through the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios of the campaign against independence.

There was the Swedish PM's warning about the 'Balkanisation of Britain' ("F--k, it's going to get colder," they comment).

There was British Business Secretary Vince Cable's prediction of a pensions black hole ("But hang on, don't we have the lowest life expectancy in the UK? No problem!")

One pundit claimed that independence would mean Scotland was legally at war with the USA.  Another said Edinburgh Zoo would have to hand its pandas back to China. Incredibly, one pundit seriously suggested that Scotland would be cut off from people from the UK who wouldn't know the international dialling code, and so would stop calling.

The Yes campaign has seen this coming - they call it 'Project Fear'.

Back in December last year, Salmond tried to head it off. He stood at a press conference in Glasgow launching the 'white paper' blueprint for a new Scotland. It was supposed to calm Scots' fears, show them the shape and ambition of what they could vote for.

"An independent Scotland will start from a position of strength," he said at the launch. It would have the eighth highest economic output per head capita the Western world, he said, with plenty of potential to aim higher. There were skilled and inventive people, abundant natural resources. Westminster had bequeathed a legacy of debt, low growth and social inequality.

"To break out of that cycle requires the ability and powers to mobilise the best of our natural and human resources," Salmond said.

"Do we, the people who live and work in Scotland, believe we are the best people to take the big decisions about our future?"

He waved the thick, heavy white paper like a talisman.

But it failed. If that was the high road, the No campaign has taken the low road, and as the song says, that's the better way to get to Scotland.

You'll lose your pension. You'll lose the BBC (and therefore Strictly Come Dancing). You won't have a currency. You won't be able to join the EU, or NATO. The oil will run out faster than you think. Taxes will go up.

Then the first debate between Salmond and Alistair Darling was an unexpected defeat for the SNP.

As Douglas Alexander, Labour's shadow foreign secretary, put it: "Alex Salmond thought this debate would be his Bannockburn – it's turning out to be his Waterloo."

Even Salmond's jokes fell flat – it seemed more childish than incisive when he pointed out there were more pandas than Tory MPs in Scotland.

More importantly, he was cornered on the currency question (as in, what would be Scotland's currency, a technical question with many sticking points), and was booed by the audience when he refused to outline a 'Plan B' if the UK didn't agree to share the pound.

Privately, the Yes campaign maintain they are convinced that the remainder of the UK would agree to a currency union with an independent Scotland. But in the face of repeated denials from the people who would make the decision, it's a hard point to prove.

They are also snookered on Scotland's European Union membership question. Again, they say they have private assurances that it would be a formality – why on earth would they not want a net financial contributor with the biggest fishing grounds in the continent?

But, says one insider, the Europeans "don't want to be happy-clappy about [independence] happening" because they don't want to seem disloyal to the UK, or to encourage other renegade regions across Europe.

Salmond, once regarded as something of a political genius, is suddenly being called a liability to the independence campaign, and even publicly toyed with the idea of promising to quit if it would sway the vote towards 'yes'.

But others say this is just a roadbump. Obama had a shocker in the first debate of his last campaign, they say, and look what happened next.

Scottish (but London-based) writer Neal Ascherson wrote last month that, whatever the outcome, Scotland will be irrevocably changed by the referendum campaign.

"Their sense of what is possible for this small nation will have been transformed," he said. "A no vote will not be the end of the story. Scotland is changing as we watch."

He found a new economic confidence in the country, and a solidifying opposition to the New Labour/Conservative moves to privatise health, education and welfare.

And he also found an 'irrational' change. Scotland's cultural cringe has vanished "almost without a trace", he said.

"Scots these days have almost forgotten about England, so fascinated are they by their own country."

This is why, privately, not for attribution, there is behind-the-hand talk that this referendum will, in the end, not be the one that counts.

It will be lost, slightly, and with a sense of regret. In the years that follow, as the circus moves on, the gaze of the UK will turn back south. The promises of greater taxation powers may be grudgingly granted, or they may not, but, the theory goes, Scots will feel acutely that they could have had more.

Labour's Henry McLeish, former first minister, opposes independence and plans to vote against secession but says a 'no' vote will only delay separation.

"You can start to peel away the layers and what you get then for most Scots is an increasingly unattractive union with very little to offer," he told The New York Times.

Salmond has promised that if it fails there will not be another referendum for a "political generation". But, say the whispers, don't be surprised if that generational change comes faster than expected.