It's nine o'clock on Thursday night and I'm blogging live from pre-launch party for the here at Pacific Quay in Glasgow. We're in the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Scotland rooftop restaurant to be precise where Archie Fisher and Mary Ann Kennedy are hosting this bi-lingual evening of live music.
Music is, after all, the universal language, so that's why tonight's edition of Travelling Folk is also being broadcast on Radio nan Gaidheal.
A damp and mucky night in Glasgow, it has to be said, but the atmosphere on the roof is very warm.
All in all, not a bad way to spend two hours at work.
The man standing too close to the edge is Alan Braidwood. It's his job to maintain and update the Radio Scotland website and over the past few weeks he hasn't had his sorrows to seek. He's been fielding the e-mails from angry and confused listeners who lament the passing of the old site and the old radio player.
In the main, the problems stem from the introduction of the new version of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer which, for the first time, allows users to seek radio and television programmes from the same place. It comes complete with relevant photographs to illustrate radio programmes and has lots of fancy new bells and whistles. You can, for example, e-mail a radio programme to a friend...and it's easier to scroll through a programme to find the particular bit you want to hear again.
But it's been a hugely complicated technical job and not everything is working as smoothly as we had hoped. Our local news bulletins, for example, have to be accessed in a different way. This called a Navigation Problem, apparently, which always makes me think of Christopher Columbus.
People thought he was sailing close to the edge too.
Meanwhile please be assured that we are working to iron out all the glitches and this new site will soon allow is to provide a lot more content.
Alan is working flat out.
I was on my way from Aberdeen to Glasgow this afternoon when I suddenly remembered about the time I put explosives in my father's cigarettes. That's why I got off the train at Carnoustie. There was a shop on the High StreetÌý that sold the detonators and I wanted to find out if it was still there.
This is the kind of mad impulse that tends to seduce me when the sun is shining and the only prospect ahead of me is a lonely hotel room on the banks of the Clyde. Besides, I reasoned, I could always catch the next train to Queen Street. There was bound to be one every hour or so.
That was my first mistake. Arriving on the deserted platform I checked the timetable and realised I would have to kill more than two hours in Carnoustie. No matter. It's a place I remembered fondly from childhood summer holidays and I knew I would have fun checking out old haunts. It's the middle of July, after all, and the place was likely to be a hive of activity.
That was my second mistake. Strolling up Station Road onto High Street I found empty street after empty street. There were a few people coming and going from the supermarket but that was it. I wandered on and looked for places associated with particular memories. Where was the little hardware store that sold cartons of airgun pellets for my rifle? Where was the cinema that screened movie versions of TV sitcoms...Please Sir, On The Buses. And where was the shop that sold the cigarette explosives.
Ah yes, there it was. MacDougall's Newsagent. It still had the seaside buckets and spades in the doorway, butÌýit seemed so much smaller. And there was no sign of the rack of tricks, novelties and practical jokes. This was how I had spent my money during those summer weeks. Money I had earned by picking raspberries in local fields. Money exchanged for whoopee cushions and black-face soap. And, of course, the tiny detonators that I inserted carefully into the end of my father's Embassy RegalsÌý
The first few didn't seem to work and I remember feeling much way way Barnes Wallis must have felt when his prototype bouncing bombs just sank into the water. But then, a day later, my Dad popped a ciggie between his lips, struck a Swan Vesta and then jumped out of his seat when he heard the bang and saw the frayed fag-end of his fag.
He looked so angry and outraged that I never did admit what I'd done. To this day he still blames problems at the manufacturers or sabotage by Virginian tobacco pickers. I'm lucky he never decided to sue.
There were no detonators on sale today. It would have been a waste of my money anyway.
He gave up smoking years ago.
I've just been saying goodbye to the ever-cheerful bods from Ö÷²¥´óÐã Blast team. They've spent the past few weeks here in Inverness as they prepared for the Blast Roadshow at the Bught Park over the weekend. It was amaziing to see their big trucks transform themselves into performance spaces, radio studios and classrooms for workshops. I even managed to persuade my own children that they would benefit from a day of creativity and, by the six o'clock last night, they actually agreed with me.
The Zedettes had signed up for the animation workshop in the morning and the comic art session in the afternoon. Last night at home they were still raving about it and had my old video camera connected to the computer and little Plasticine figures could be seen dancing across the screen.
The Blast project has certainly come a long way since the days, years ago, when I used to manage the Scottish side of it. At that time the workshops tended to be one-off affairs, scattered across the country and across the year. Now they have trucks and tents and giveaways. I'm told they'll be back in Scotland next summer.
The Blast village in Inverness was set up just outside the enclosure for the annual Highland Games. Kids with a Blast ID card were allowed free entry to the Games, but adults had to pay six quid.
So, between workshops yesterday, I sent to the Zedettes in to check out the fun. Meanwhile, I sat in the car.
Look out for a soon-to-be-made animated epic about a Skinflint Dad .
I was standing there in front of about a hundred Ö÷²¥´óÐã colleagues, holding a brown enevlope and resisting all temptation to trade it for another one which contained fifty quid. No, this wasn't some absurd dream, but an audience event at Pacific Quay featuring 'mentalist' Drew McAdam.
Drew is an expert on memory, persuasion and lie detection and his talents are showcased in a new fourt-part series - School for Genius - which begins on Monday morning. In each programme we hear Drew as he goes into schools and workplaces and shares his various techniques with the people he meets.
Today he was doing that in front of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Scotland staff who were leaning over balconies to get a look at him. At one point he chose me as one of his four "volunteers from the audience" as he distributed a number of brown envelopes and promised that one of them contained a fifty-pound note. If you kept the correct envelope you were allowed to keep the money.
Then he offered us all the chance to swap envelopes with him or each other. I stood my ground, despite all his efforts to persuade me to trade with him. Of course, when I finally tore open the enevlope it contained some lottery scratch cards.
Apparently Drew had realised from the outset that I was a stubborn, dig-you-feet-in kind of bloke and that nothing he said would persuade me to change my mind. He kept his money.
Worrying!
It's almost a year to the day since work began on the refurbishment of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Scotland's Inverness building. Yesterday I was allowed inside for a sneaky glimpse of our new offices and technical areas. It was very impressive and there's also a much-improved reception area which should be useful for audience events such as Children In Need broadcasts.
I hope to be at my new desk by the end of next week.
Ìý
Ìý
I've just been speaking on Ö÷²¥´óÐã London's radio phone-in, hosted by Vanessa Feltz. It was she who chaired yesterday's Winehouse or White House session at the Radio Festival in Glasgow and she wanted me to elaborate on my views this morning.
As we got into the topic of celebrities and their privacy, Vanessa revealed that she had gone back to London last night and was enjoying some food in a "nothing special kebab shop" when she suddently noticed that someone was taking photographs of her from a van parked outside in the street.
"Now is that news?" she asked me.
"Well, it depends, " I responded, "what kind of kebab was it?"
She defended her food choice and insisted it had contained no illegal ingredients, no cocaine, nothing.
Of course the sad truth is that there is actually an appetite and a market for photographs of celebrities stuffing their faces in back-street cafes. It's not important, but, for many people, it is interesting. I suppose our task in journalism is to make the important stuff...wars, crime, the economy, education...as interesting and as relevant as possible.
As I said to Vanessa, it might be very interesting if I was to break into your house and have a look through your drawers, but that doesn't make it right.
I don't think she'll call me back.
I have to confess that, until last week, I knew very little about Amy Winehouse. Our music producers in Aberdeen once told me they had seen her play live in that city but this was years ago and "before the beehive hair and tatoos". They described her as a "lovely girl".
Then, just recently, I was asked by Tom Bateman, a duty editor on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio One's Newsbeat programe, to take part in a session he was organising at the It was called "Winehouse or White House" and would focus on the growth of showbiz news in the media.ÌýTom told me he was having difficulty finding anyone to take the "anti-showbiz" line so I agreed to step in.
Naturally I started researching the topic and that included trawling through the various press reports about Amy Winehouse. That story from my Aberdeen colleagues was my starting point, but as I Googled my way through this young singer's career highs and lows I was actually moved to tears by what I was reading. That's not saying much, mind you, because I tend to well up watching old black & white movies.
What struck me most of all was the amount of time we in the media devote to covering stories about self-destructing celebrities.ÌýIt's almost like they are characters in a soap opera instead of real people. Yet Amy Winehouse is just 24 years old and a few years ago was a "lovely girl".
I said all this and more at the Radio Festival this morning. I appealed to my fellowÌýjournalists and broadcasters to devote more airtime to stories that are important.
Yet, here's the irony. Tonight I find myself part of about Amy Winehouse.
Ìý
A career-endangering start for me at the Radio Festival, mainly because I decided to sit right in the front row for last night's opening debate at the City Halls. Sally Magnusson was in the chair and the motion was "This House likes it local".
First to speak was one of my ultimate bosses, Pat Loughrey, the Director of Nations and Regions. But sitting next to me was my colleague Tony Currie who, for reasons that remain mysterious, used the question and answer session to launch into a heated (and incoherent) argument with Pat about the quality of local radio and the absence of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Local Radio in places like Edinburgh and Glasgow.
All very well, but then Tony draped his arm around me and implicated me as a supporter of his tirade. This is what you call guilt by association.
"I'm not really with him!" I managed to mumble into the microphone in Tony's hand.
A better set of sessions this morning with my personal highlight being a outsiders view of radio presented by the Guardian's Emily Bell. I'm a huge fan of her writing and podcasting and so, after break for tea and chocolate-chip cookies, I hung around in the foyer to say hello.
She was completely self-effacing and charming and it was only later I realised I had melted chocolate chips staining the front of my shirt.
So, I might be looking for a new job before this festival is over, but I don't think the Guardian is going to be an option.
