But clients sometimes want their material to take a certain slant. Naturally, the good points of a destination get the emphasis. Nobody ever said - 'Go on, tell them what you really think.'

So that’s why I’m writing this. Maybe you are planning a trip and you really only have a week – in which case some of the tour suggestions should be helpful. But Scotland in a week is really just another way of saying that I hope this site will point you towards the best bits but also will make you look at some of the icons of this little European nation in a fresh way.

I’m thinking here of the inevitable tartan packaging, the clans of old and castles, for instance. Plus some of the historical characters you might encounter, from Robert Burns (please don’t call him Rabbie until you get to know him better) to Robert the Bruce (who prefers to be King Robert I – and quite right, too.) OK, this is the deal. You gently wander through some information here about my home country and I promise that I’ll be straightforward and honest and reasonably entertaining on the way. After all, nobody in the tourism trade has asked me to do this. I’m free to select and share the information with you without any bias, after all these years of living and exploring my homeland but having to write a visitor industry version of Scotland that may have relied on too many sunny sky pictures!

It’s still a great place though. So come and visit soon. Trust me, there really are ways and means of dealing with those pesky midges……

PS Just a wee note about the photographs. All the pictures on the site are mine, unless otherwise stated. Not all have blue sky. Just a few, in fact, if you look closely (and I’d rather you didn’t), appear to have small clouds of black dots and in a very few instances, flying snakes. These are not midges or some kind of Scottish crypto-zoology. No, it’s just dust.

While the large majority of the pics are digital, I delved into my collection of colour transparencies going back many years. Some had returned from a photo library that had not survived into the digital age. Others were in cupboards or drawers and, in a few cases, neatly stacked, in piles of ones, all over the place. I have scanned the relevant ones for this site. Heck, it’s a bit of a fiddle, isn’t it? But you’re worth it!