FACE TO FACE

IT'S always fascinating (well, nearly always)to meet people who have done extraordinary things.
And writing their stories becomes a pleasure, not a chore.
It's a fact of life that some people naturally respond better to journalists' questioning than others.
And, by the same token, there are some times when an interview feels doomed from the start: there's little connection or chemistry between you and your subject, their answers are flat and lazy and, to make matters worse, a PR is lingering in the background listening in.
Occasionally (but not very often) there's a horrible sinking feeling as the interview progresses, the point where you wonder what the hell you are actually going to WRITE.
One actress springs to mind with a dazzling on-screen personality but, in real life, fairly bereft of character. In spite of my best attempts to squeeze out something of interest she was a lost cause.
Others you imagine will be blunt and unhelpful turn out to be wonderful to interview.
Another challenge is finding yourself interviewing someone you've already (recently) interviewed. In the case of Irvine Welsh, there wasn't a terribly long gap between interviews but the end results were, I think, poles apart.
Anyway, below are a few 'celebrity' interviews. I've started with three from the bizarre world of the Bay City Rollers, thrown in some sport and some well known faces. More to be posted as and when I find them!

PEOPLE: Weird world of Tam Paton

TAM PATON has carefully lowered himself on to a massive red leather couch in his opulently decorated sitting room, chunky gold and diamond jewellery dripping from his right hand, his suit trousers creeping up to reveal thick grey sports socks worn with his smartly polished shoes.

"Herman!", he calls towards the kitchen of his secluded home on the outskirts of the city. "Tea please!"

Herman, a strapping young man with a frown, appears at the one-time Bay City Rollers' manager's side to take his order then shuffles back to a dimly lit kitchen where two other young men are chatting.

"Herman's been here for a while," explains Paton, the jewellery rattling on his wrist.

"He walks my dogs for me. There's Blockie, he does all the electrical work around the house and the garden. Spam's been here for nine years, he loves it because he gets to drive my Range Rover."

One of Paton's four dogs - he has two Rottweilers and two Staffordshire bull terriers - has already been ushered out of sight, no longer snarling and growling, it has settled in Paton's gloomy "den", beside the kitchen: a shadowy corner lined with photos of Paton in his prime; at the controls of an aircraft, in a white suit in Jamaica, posing with Lulu.

There's a wall of photographs of his family, others of the Bay City Rollers, shelves groan with CDs, a cabinet heaves with odd-shaped bottles of sugary liqueurs and a TV - one of many massive ones dotted around the house - blares.

Outside in the hall, where a statuette of Jesus sits on a narrow table alongside a small forgotten tinsel Christmas tree, a faint whiff of cannabis lingers in the stale air.

Herman delivers tea and Paton breaks off from pointing out two £1000 chandeliers dangling from his sitting room ceiling to explain his bizarre living arrangements with his entourage of young men, his recent drugs fine, his bizarre attempt at killing himself by choking on a £1 coin and why he believes he has become one of Scotland's most loathed characters.

Indeed, Paton is acutely aware that he doesn't have many fans outwith what he calls "the inner circle."

"I've been spat at in the street," the bragging gone now, his mood more desolate. "I go to the supermarket and people walk into doors they are so busy staring at me, they trip over trolleys. It's because I'm a peculiarity, I'm not the normal and I don't live the normal life. I was never meant to be normal.

"I went to a restaurant recently," he continues. "The owner came up and asked 'Are you Tam Paton? Then you'll have to leave, we don't want your type in here. Leave immediately'. That hurts me, it really does. I'm being judged by people, who are they to judge? One lad, he was beaten up, nearly lost an eye and I paid him to do some paintings. He got an art show in Lochgelly and he put my name forward as a guest. As soon as the organisers saw my name," he adopts a whining posh tone, "Oh no! We can't have him there. He is forbidden!'" he spits. "I went with Spam to hospital the other day and he told me one of the staff said 'he's not my favourite person'. That upset me."

Paton, a clever manipulator who duped a generation of Rollers fans into believing they performed on their early records and preferred a glass of milk to sex and drugs, has been further upset by the legal action that has hung over him since police raided his home in 2003 and discovered nearly £26,000 worth of cannabis.

The case came to a head earlier this week when he was fined £20,000 after admitting being concerned in the supply of cannabis at his Little Kellerstain home off Gogar Station Road. Confiscation proceedings to seize crime profits, however, resulted in him handing over £180,000 - significantly more than the value of the drug police recovered.

Still, Paton insists he's no drugs baron, that the six kilos of cannabis was simply for residents at his home to share, that his £8 million property empire is the result of shrewd purchasing in the early 80s, income from housing homeless people and nothing to do with drugs.

"I was raided five times, they got lucky twice," he shrugs. "I'm not going to sit here and say I think cannabis is good. I know the effects it can have, paranoia, schizophrenia.

"I have always taken my cannabis in yoghurt, I have high blood pressure, it calms it down to the extent I sit and watch Mickey Mouse and think it's hilarious."

Paton's links with drugs have hardly helped his image, yet he argues it was his conviction 25 years ago for gross indecency involving two teenagers - one 16, the other 17 - leading to three years in jail that has forever tarnished him in the eyes of the public.

He argues that he is a victim of outdated attitudes, of a sustained media campaign against him and former friends who have lied about him. Ex-Roller Pat McGlynn's claims he attempted to rape him are dismissed as an attempt at publicity for bandmate Les McKeown's autobiography which were never investigated.

"I was arrested in 1979 for gross indecency, a crime that ten years later didn't even exist," he moans. "These were laddies in their late teens and the age of consent at the time was 21. They didn't want to make a complaint against me, they were made to. Then a word entered our language: paedophile.

"What people don't know they make up. They see this guy, he's got money and jewellery," he continues, waving his diamond-encrusted hands, "and they think 'what's the worst thing in the world we can call him'."

BEING arrested as part of the investigation into shamed pop guru Jonathan King's liaisons with teenage boys didn't help. Again he wasn't charged, yet Paton was aware how his arrest would be viewed.

"I tried to commit suicide," he recalls. "I was held in a cell in Berwick, left on a concrete slab.

"They asked me if I had sex with my nephew because I had pictures of him. Of course I have pictures, he's my sister's son! They left me in this cell and I had a GBP 1 coin in my pocket. I thought I can't go through this again, people believing I'm some kind of freak. I tried to choke myself, to lodge the coin in my throat.

"I was thinking about my mother and my father. My family reading all this crap. I tried to do it, but I got scared."

The doorbell chimes regularly with visitors coming and going, congregating in the kitchen just off a tiled leisure suite lit with a dour red glow.

Paton calls to one young man with a shaved head to remove a soggy, smelly rug from the floor before proudly showing off the plunge pool, a massive hot tub, a sauna and an exercise area with treadmill, step machine and numerous sets of scales. He's delighted he has managed to lose six stones - "being told you will die unless you lose weight is a great motivator" - and he's now waiting for a heart valve operation which, despite his millionaire status, will be provided on the NHS.

There is, however, a dilemma. Paton's mood swings again as he reveals he is a vegetarian, an animal lover who can't face the suggestion that his heart valve might be replaced by a pig's. "I can't do it," he squirms. "I can't have an animal die to save me. It's not right."

Two heart attacks and a stroke, and 69-year-old Paton has made arrangements, just in case. When his time comes, his property empire, TDP Investments, will be taken over by trustees and Paton will be cremated to Bing Crosby singing That's The Way Life Is.

He fully expects baying crowds to push his coffin through the crematorium doors, cheering.

His lawyer has drawn up his will, cash for various animal charities - the Canine Defence League, something for the dog and cat home at Seafield, a bit for the children's hospice at Kinross. "It'll be then that people will turn around and say, 'oh he was OK after all, he wasn't the dirty old bugger that we thought he was'," he chuckles.

Still, there's no escaping his bizarre living arrangements. The young men, none seems older than 30, sleep in four bedrooms lining the corridor leading to Paton's cluttered master bedroom.

"People phone and say can you accommodate someone," says Paton. "There's Chris, he's 29, married, five of a family. He was into heroin, he's on detox now. His mother and his wife didn't want anything to do with him. I fill that gap."

Herman, it transpires, wanders around talking to himself. Spam has the boyish looks of a teenager and arrived after falling out with his parents. "If they weren't here, I'd be sitting here going 'tum de tum de tum, what are you going to do tonight then Tam?' I can be a lonely animal at times.

"I tell these lads to have a shave or get cleaned up. Maybe they are living off me but I don't want to be rattling around in this house all by myself," says Paton.

He shuffles outside to lean on one of two garish lion statues guarding the front door. The walls around the house are swathed

with creepers and barbed wire, soon a steel shutter will roll over the front entrance. It's to keep him safe, he explains, after three attempts on his life, one of which only ended when he pulled an imitation Smith and Wesson on his machete-wielding attacker and held it to his head. Perhaps he is right to be so security conscious - three men have been arrested and charged following a robbery at his home last October.

Back inside the house one young man is busy preparing dinner. Paton, despite the diet, is looking forward to it.

"It's steak and chips," he says gleefully, suddenly forgetful that he's a supposed to be vegetarian.

In the garden behind him, a couple of white doves have somehow escaped from his packed aviary where they are usually kept secure behind wire.

"They shouldn't be out," mutters Paton, narrowing his eyes to watch as they sweep over his lawn. "A lot of birds of prey around here. They might get them."

Edinburgh Evening News: January 26, 2007

PEOPLE: Roller Pat's prison ordeal

THE cold, hard nozzle of a police drugs squad officer's gun pressed down on the back of ex-Bay City Roller Pat McGlynn's head as he lay face down in the car park of an Essex hotel.

Sirens squealed in the background, above him sounded the rotor blades of a police helicopter, all around were officers in flak jackets, firearms pointed menacingly in his direction.

Someone was pinning down his legs, someone else was tugging at his hands, snapping on police cuffs, growling that he was under arrest.

All of a sudden, bouncing around on stage trussed up in tartan trousers singing Shang-a-lang before a packed auditorium of tear-streaked teenagers must have seemed a very long way away . . .

Pat sits on the edge of his white leather couch strewn with plump Versace cushions in the living-room of his Liberton Brae home and speaks frankly for the first time of how he thought he was going to die on that sunny day nine months ago.

On the wall to his left are two gold discs and one suitably covered in tartan from his days as a member of one of the world's first "boy bands", while to his right, above the glowing open fire is a wooden crucifix which he and wife Janine regularly prayed to as the reality of his situation sank in.

"It was absolutely terrifying," he begins, leaning forward, speaking rapidly, desperate to tell his side of yet another bizarre story linked to Scotland's most famous band. "I really thought I was going to be shot, that I was going to die right there and then," he continues. "I didn't have a clue what was going on. I thought maybe it was terrorists or something, people posing as police officers. It was the worse moment of my life.

"I'm not joking," he adds, breaking into a grin: "I just about wet myself!"

Pat, still fresh faced at 47, talks at breakneck speed, his mind flitting from the day of his arrest to his six weeks in the category B Chelmsford Prison in Essex, alongside more than 570 other prisoners, to his nerve-wracking appearance at Basildon Crown Court last month to finally hearing the words he had prayed he would hear: not guilty.

Now six weeks have elapsed since the headline-grabbing court case ended with a unanimous jury verdict clearing him and fellow Roller Les McKeown of conspiring to supply cocaine, yet Pat still wakes up shaking in the night, his sleep disturbed by vivid nightmares of police, prison and guns.

He freely admits he has been through dark, depressing days when his usually upbeat demeanour has crumbled, when he's driven across the Forth Road Bridge and contemplated throwing himself over the edge.

And there have been other days, more recently, when he looks back on it all, shakes his head in disbelief and cracks another joke. "I don't want to ever hear anyone singing Bye Bye Baby again," he throws himself back on the couch and starts to laugh. "Every night inside, the other prisoners thought it would be funny to sing it and hammer on the walls. Funny for them maybe, but really scary for me."

The nightmare started when he arrived in Essex last May on his way to meet up with former band mate McKeown to discuss the prospect of a national tour alongside clean-cut Mormon brothers, The Osmonds and fellow Seventies pop idol David Essex.

"I went down to London to see Les because I was going to do some guitar on stage with him," says Pat. "I was looking for a new car and Les had put me in touch with some friends of his. So I went to this hotel car park to look at this Porsche they had. We were standing around, talking about music when the next thing I know we're surrounded by police with guns.

"Ha!" he laughs again, "maybe they were worried that I was going to start playing Shang-a-lang."

Pat and financial systems analyst Alistair Murray were arrested at the car park, along with Tony Burt, a 48-year-old car dealer and Jason Abbott, 34, an engineer. Les McKeown was arrested later at his London home. Detectives were said to have found more than GBP 16,000 in cash in a washbag in the car Pat and Murray had been travelling in - money they claimed was for buying the car.

Meanwhile, a bag of cocaine worth at least GBP 16,000 was found in the car Burt and Abbott had travelled in. Once processed, the drug would have had a street value of around GBP 50,000.

Burt and Abbott both admitted conspiring to supply cocaine. But for Pat, McKeown and mutual friend Murray, a two-week court case beckoned. But first Pat was thrown behind bars, remanded in custody alongside convicted murderers who were only too eager to warn him that he could be facing ten years in prison.

On the outside, wife Janine frantically tried to raise the GBP 50,000 needed to release him on bail at the same time as retaining an air of calmness for the couple's six-year-old daughter, Mia.

"It was Mia that kept us both going," says Janine, 45, a pretty long-haired blonde singer who became Pat's partner 22 years ago. "But it was so frightening. I wanted him back home as soon as possible, but for some reason they refused bail. We had to try a second time - it was six weeks before we could get him out of there. I had to raise GBP 50,000 for bail, we found our assets had been frozen and he was 800 miles away.

"I was driving up and down, then when I got to visit we couldn't properly talk . . . it was the worst time of our lives."

Which is going some considering what a bizarre life it has been for Pat McGlynn. Plucked from school in 1975 to join perhaps the most successful group in the world at the time after founder member Alan Longmuir left the band, he embarked on a drink and drug-fuelled existence as a pop star, with on-tap groupies and sell-out concerts in front of screaming fans.

He quit the band in 1977, later claiming he stabbed the band's manager Tam Paton in the shoulder with a bread knife he kept under his pillow.

Eventually there followed a complaint to police that Paton, who was jailed for three years for gross indecency towards two teenage boys in the 1980s, had tried to rape him.

To cap it all, the Rollers have been embroiled in a decades-long battle against their former record company, claiming they are owed millions in unpaid royalties.

"The curse of the Rollers strikes again," Pat shrugs. "There's millions of pounds at stake and I don't think I'll ever see any of it. As for Tam Paton, well, I haven't spoken to him for 30 years. There's no point feeling bitter about things, it just messes up your head. You just try to forgive so you can move on. What I've been through makes you realise that there are more important things in life, like your friends, your family and being free."

The couple are now turning their sights to the future. Their plans to develop two acres of land at Loanhead into a hotel and recording studio complex were temporarily shelved by the case, their lives in limbo for nine months.

"I was putting a lot of things together just before this all happened," says Pat, the son of a Niddrie scrapyard boss.

"I'm producing a few bands, I've been working on starting my own record company, writing songs. I had my web page almost ready to go . . . there was a lot happening.

"I've lost nine months because of this. Now, well, I don't know where to start."

One thing he's clear on. The affair has certainly altered his friendship with former Rollers' frontman McKeown, who has battled drug and drink addictions for decades.

Pat sighs: "Les said he didn't know his mate was involved in things like that - he has known him for 20 years. There was me thinking I was going to prison for ten years for something I didn't do, thinking I might not be there to see my daughter become a teenager. I was thinking about jumping in the harbour, I was on medicine for depression.

"So, no, I don't really want to go near Les now; I don't want to be involved in that situation, whether it's drinking or anything. To be honest, I just want to get on with living my life and enjoying it."

Edinburgh Evening News March 13, 2006

PEOPLE: Alan's still rolling with the punches

IT'S been a long day. Alan Longmuir, ex-Bay City Roller, one-time superstar and boy band idol for a generation of over- excited schoolgirls, finally flops on to the leather couch in his living room and takes a long sip from a cool glass of lager.

He's been up since 5.30am, he explains, home at around 7pm - the same shift he packs in every single working day even though he's endured two heart attacks, a debilitating stroke and more recently a 60th birthday. It's a tough gig and there's not even a guitar, a hysterical tartan-clad fan or a bowl of Colombia's finest in sight.

It turns out one of the founder members of Scotland's biggest ever pop groups, the Bay City Rollers, is back plying his trade as a plumber, trekking daily by train from his home in Stirling to Dundee, still hoping that one day the 20-year legal battle for money he and his fellow Rollers say they are owed from their days of international stardom just might come good.

"Aye, a million pounds, that'd be nice, but I wouldn't mind if it was more," he says with a lopsided grin. "I'm not being greedy but I think it would be nice to have something to show for it all."

In fact, there's not much to show for a meteoric rise through the charts that saw the Edinburgh-based boy band become global superstars on a scale unseen since The Beatles; catapulted from playing at Rosewell Miners' club to rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty. They fled hordes of Japanese fans intent on ripping the clothes from their backs, shed their boy-next-door images to party with The Who wildman Keith Moon and Led Zeppelin's infamous drummer John Bonham accompanied by naked blondes and bowls of drugs presented for consumption like party snacks.

Not that the drugs were to Alan's taste. "Och I tried them, of course, everyone did. But to be honest, me and Woody [Stuart Wood] preferred a pint."

At the peak of their international fame - 1976 saw the Rollers break the American charts - they decamped to Hollywood for Sunday lunch at sex kitten Brit Ekland's mansion.

"We were there one day and that Ryan O'Neal came to the door," remembers Alan. "It was quite funny - she got up, threw open the door and yelled at him to 'F-off, the Rollers are here'."

Hard to imagine all that now as he sits in his pleasant Stirling home, reflecting on his recent birthday bash - an occasion marked with a return to the stage, albeit at a local pub where he brought the house down with a self-proclaimed nervy rendition of Shangalang, during which he forgot the words.

If he had a flashback to the gig in Canada when the five Edinburgh lads played to 200,000 fans for all of 15 minutes before security cut the gig for safety reasons, it wouldn't be a surprise. After all, memories, it transpires, are all the man dubbed "the reluctant Roller" has left.

"Everything's gone," he admits. "I used to have gold discs, clothes, guitars but it's all away. I keep hearing about things being sold on eBay and I think 'was that mine and how did it end up there?'.

"I had a lot of stuff in storage then I found that people were pretty much helping themselves - there were folk taking stuff and going off to fancy dress parties dressed in my gear.

"Then I was told the roof had fallen in on the place where it was being stored and that everything was destroyed."

His wife Eileen rolls her eyes and sighs with disbelief. There may have been a time when she dreamt of being married to a pop star, wed into a life of luxurious cars and holidays in Las Vegas with movie stars for friends.

The reality, however, is rather different. "It's ridiculous he hasn't anything to show for those years," she complains. "Just think of all that merchandise for a start - I remember Marks & Spencer selling bra and knicker sets with the Bay City Rollers on them.

"Where did all the money for that go?"

The couple wed ten years ago after Alan had suffered two heart attacks brought on, he says, from overwork, the collapse of his hotel business and a messy divorce. Eileen certainly didn't marry him for his pop star wealth - when they met he didn't even have a roof over his head.

"I preferred David Cassidy anyway," she laughs only for Alan to shatter a million fantasies by pitching in: "He had rotten skin, he was all spots." Alan, the oldest Roller, with a passion for music and - unfortunately given the fame that would come his way - a dislike of the spotlight, never really imagined it would pan out the way it did.

He was just a boy in the fifties when he performed for the first time - entertaining guests at his parents' Caledonia Street home dressed in the top hat and coat his father wore in his job as St Cuthbert's Co-op undertaker.

"He used to come along the street with the hearse and people would wonder who had died, but it was just him coming home for his lunch," he smiles.

By the time the young Alan left Dalry Primary bound for Tynecastle High, he had already witnessed the adulation that would one day become his. "I went to the Scotia picture house in Dalry Road and Jailhouse Rock was on," he recalls. "I saw the way the girls were jumping up and down over Elvis I thought, 'Aye, this will do me'.

"That film had a huge influence on me, Jailhouse Rock was the thing that got me, Elvis was the guy everyone wanted to be."

Eventually Alan, brother Derek, Eric Faulkner, Stuart Wood and frontman Les McKeown would taste something of the same fan adoration as The King.

Alan's first band, The Ambassadors, had morphed into The Saxons, gigs had come thick and fast around the Capital and down to the Borders when Alan approached local bandleader Tam Paton for advice. "We'd changed our name," he remembers. "There was a band called Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and we liked the sound of that. We started talking about wheels and came up with Rollers. Someone stuck in pin in a map of America. It came up with Arkansas but the Arkansas Rollers didn't have the right ring. We did it again and hit Bay City - so that was the name."

The rest is history. Paton's skill for publicity combined with a series of catchy songs, boy-next-door looks and a unique take on fashion - tartan trousers, bomber jackets, skin tight v-neck jumpers - and it wasn't long before Alan's face was plastered over almost every young girl's bedroom wall.

"Those platforms, they were murder," he groans, remembering attempting to walk along Morrison Street in ridiculously-high heels.

Soon walking down the street would become a distant memory as the Rollers became swamped by teenage hysteria - their success, says Alan, as much a factor in their eventual demise as the personality clashes and excessive behaviour of some of its members.

"We were prisoners of our own success," he remembers. "My sister was getting married in 1975 and I remember leaving my parents' house to go to the wedding and being mobbed by girls pulling my hair and ripping at my clothes. They even tore off my flower.

"It was insane, it got scary. I used to try to get out by myself to go for a pint - sometimes they didn't recognise you if you were wearing ordinary clothes. They didn't seem to realise that we didn't walk around all the time in baggy tartan trousers and platform shoes! I'd go fishing down at the Water of Leith when I was back at home, put on my wellies and disappear for an afternoon.

"But for most of the time all I ever saw was inside a hotel room."

The band eventually imploded under the intense pressure, character clashes and disputes. "The music business really stinks," says Alan. "We were just getting on with it, but there were people conning us left, right and centre.

"It's not surprising money has gone missing. We'd be getting ready to go on stage and someone would shove a contract in front of us and say 'sign it '. We didn't know half of what we were signing for."

While money squabbles continue, so have the attempts at reviving the original line-up, most recently in 2000 when the band were scheduled to follow up a successful appearance at Edinburgh's Hogmanay with a tour.

"I couldn't be bothered with it," shrugs Alan. "We're sitting around and one doesn't want that and someone else wants this. I just picked up my bag and said 'bye'. Who needs all that?"

Music's loss means the world of blocked pipes and clogged loos has gained a plumber. Although he'd rather be taking it easy, the 60-year-old pin up has something to show for his longevity.

"I've got my bus pass," he grins. "So it's not all bad, is it?"

'Les was just this wee guy from Broomhouse'

Derek relives the highs and lows of life as a Roller. . .

ON TAM PATON

He was good guy gone bad. He had a band that at one point supported The Beatles - I think he was living through his own craving for fame through us. He was clever and he got our name out there. But I don't like the man.

ON JOHN LENNON

He wrote me a note. It said something like: 'Dear Alan, sorry I can't make it along to the Rollers' gig but Yoko is about to have our baby.' I wish I'd kept it, but back then you didn't really appreciate these things. I was in New York, just a few hundred yards away, the day he was shot. That really affected me badly."

ON LES McKEOWN:

Les was thrown in at the deep end. At first they wanted me to be the frontman and I said it wasn't for me. Les came on board and first time on stage he was so nervous he was shaking - he was just this wee guy from Broomhouse.

ON BAND FEUDS

There was a huge clash of egos between Les and Eric, they just couldn't sort things out. There were a lot of arguments. There were a lot of drugs going about too and we were working under intense pressure.

ON FAME

It was hard to take in. I remember sitting at the bar of the Beverly Hills Hotel , there was Patrick Magee, Barbra Streisand, Susan George, Eric Estrada from TV show Chips, David Soul and Alan Longmuir, the plumber from Edinburgh.

ON HIGHLIGHTS

The best bits were probably being in make-up in Top of the Pops, sitting next to Olivia Newton John and then seeing one of Pan's People without a stitch on.
Edinburgh Evening News July 4, 2008

PEOPLE: Gavin Hastings, ready for battle.

IT will be among the highlights of the Scottish rugby calendar. But when Scotland take on the All Blacks in the maelstrom of a packed Murrayfield stadium on Sunday, there will be more than points at stake.

Scottish pride, the thrill of the touchdown and a gritty mouthful of turf: no-one knows any of it better than the towering frame of the casually dressed figure relaxing in the boardroom of his New Town Office.

For when it comes to Scottish rugby legends, instantly recognisable faces and the kind of calm demeanour required to score a record-breaking 227 points in a Rugby World Cup career - plus 39 conversions or 36 penalty goals notched up during his three World Cup tournaments - Gavin Hastings is in a league of his own.

Now 45, these days the hair is little greyer yet the former Scotland full-back looks as fit, strong and able as he did back in 1995 when he finally hung up his prized international shirt after a sterling career that saw him appear for his country 61 times, captain Scotland and the British Lions, achieve a Grand Slam win and grasp the Calcutta Cup after a memorable roasting of an over-confident English side in 1990.

Surely being a spectator at the greatest rugby show on earth can't really compare with all of that?

Yet as he leans forward across the oval desk in his company's Melville Street boardroom, showing that familiar lop-sided grin, he insists he is more than happy to be a spectator these days.

"For a year or so when I finished I might still have harboured the belief that I could still have been out there competing, but when you've been finished for 12 years, those sorts of thoughts no longer enter my head," he smiles.

"The game has changed out of all recognition. The professional structure came in after I retired, the game has changed quicker than any other major sport. With it being full time, the boys' body shapes have changed. It has become much more physical."

Still, he believes that if he was 20 years younger, he would be out there, competing at that top level in a Scotland strip: "I'm a great believer that if you were good enough in one generation, you'd be good enough in the next one. You can only compare yourself with the guys that we played against. I have no doubts that I would be training differently today but I think that I would have enjoyed being a professional player."

These days "Big Gav" is still never far from the rugby pitch. Whether it's commentating on matches for the BBC, working with sports and event management company Platinum-One or watching his ten-year-old son Adam thundering by in his dad's footsteps, playing in a George Watson's rugger shirt.

He is also the face of next September's Golden Oldies rugby tournament, when more than 4000 rugby veterans from around the world will descend on Edinburgh for an eight-day festival.

And, of course, there's his recent appointment as chairman of Edinburgh - the city's professional rugby squad which is emerging and refocussing after a turbulent summer which saw a run-in between former owner Bob Carruthers and the Scottish Rugby Union.

It's a role at the coal face of the game that Gavin is clearly relishing - even though he is more ambassador than hands-on in the day-to-day running of the club.

"The game has been professional for 12 years but in terms of the crowds that Edinburgh play in front of, they are no bigger now than the average crowds that I and many others were playing in front of 15 years ago. We have to attract more supporters," he says.

The club's current Murrayfield base may not be the solution, but a new, smaller stadium might be.

"At the moment we're playing in a 67,500-seat stadium, so demand for a ticket isn't really there. We can't create a demand for tickets so that people want to buy their tickets early. If we know that in five years' time we are going to get a new stadium part-funded by Edinburgh City council, that's terrific, let's work towards that."

Edinburgh-born, Gavin still lives in the city, as do his parents and his brother, fellow rugby star Scott. Gavin is passionate about the idea that a Capital side can compete at the highest level in the sport.

"I'm a great fan of Edinburgh, we have got one of the great capital cities in Europe. I think it's very important for Edinburgh as a city to have a sporting team - male, female or mixed - that represents Edinburgh at the highest level of competition in Europe," he explains.

"We don't have a single Edinburgh team in soccer, but we do have an Edinburgh team in rugby. So we have to grow the brand so in five or ten years time we are going to be up there, challenging and competing with the best."

He certainly has plenty of clout and an arsenal of sporting contacts to draw on. Indeed, the company he chairs and his brother Scott works for is Platinum One - instigators of Spanish football giants Barcelona's hugely-successful pre-season trip to these shores.

"The senior directors of Barcelona were very keen to come over to Scotland and stay in St Andrews and play golf," he says. "They wanted to train away from the heat of the Spanish summer. It worked out for everyone."

So well, in fact, that he is optimistic that the exercise can be repeated. "I'm sure at some stage they will come back," he nods. "In fact, we are hoping to bring more high profile names to Scotland for pre-season training."

Platinum One also represents a number of football players, organises sports hospitality events and was key in helping Scotland successfully bid to host the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles in 2014. And it's clear that between his rugby commitments, work schedules and personal fitness regime, Gavin is clearly in as much demand these days as he may have been as an international star.

There is also, however, time for his wife Diane, 42, son Adam and eight-year-old Holly, who are both pupils at Watson's, his former school.

And could there be good news for Scotland fans, for Adam appears to have inherited his father's sports genes with a passion for rugby and football.

But which will the Hastings' lad opt to follow? "I'd never dream of steering him away from football to rugby," grins Gavin. "He loves both and he loves competitive sports. And I enjoy supporting him very much."

He'd love to see rugby emerge from the shadow of football and be adopted by more state schools - just as he laments the state of the nation's health and wishes more public cash could be steered into encouraging all sports at school level.

He firmly believes the day will come when more Scots develop an interest in the game beyond the Six Nations, emotionally-charged Scotland-England clashes and, of course, the Rugby World Cup.

"Rugby is a second cousin sport in Scotland," he says. "It's a challenge to change that, but that will come.

"There's an underlying support and depth of feeling for the game across a wide section of the community. It just needs our professional team to be successful."

Sunday will have a particular poignancy for Gavin: his final appearance was in June 1995, when Scotland lost 48-30 to the All Blacks in a World Cup quarter-final in Pretoria.

No doubt the memories will come flooding back, but, as he says: "I can't think that there will ever be a time when I'm not involved with rugby."

"I like the people, I like the sport. I have a lot of friends in it and it has been good to me over the years.

"I just hope I can be in a position to give something back."


Edinburgh Evening News September 21 2007

PEOPLE: Here is the news with Gavin Estler

THE shock of the explosion had been bad enough - Gavin Esler, a young newshound, on one of his first days in his first job, couldn't have begun to imagine what would come next.

He was a junior reporter on a Belfast paper, finding his feet in the world of newspapers. Suddenly Duddingston Primary School, his first teacher Miss Darling, and the ageing ABC book so dated that "G" stood for gas globes - much to the bafflement of the young students of 1958 - seemed a very long way away.

Today, of course, he's an experienced, steady hand in the world of dramatic news, witness to life-changing events and a fair amount of political backstabbing - a familiar face known for grilling world leaders on the small screen.

He's an award-winning broadcaster, Newsnight presenter and author of a string of gritty novels, the latest one just out.

But back in 1976, aged 23, he was just a frightened young man from Edinburgh, confronted by bloody terrorism and hatred in its harshest form.

"I got there before the police and the ambulance crews," he remembers, thinking back to the Belfast North Street arcade bomb, an IRA device which killed four shoppers, the youngest aged just 19. "It was truly horrible."

A baptism of fire indeed for the young Esler, who had arrived in Northern Ireland only days before, armed with a university degree in English literature, a post- graduate journalism course under his belt and a few weeks training in the comparatively calm environment of Cardiff.

"It became quite overwhelming really," Esler says. "I got to the office to hear that the IRA had stopped a van in South Armagh, got all the Protestants out and shot dead ten people - simply because they were Protestants.

"Everyone from the Belfast Telegraph had gone there, which left me in this huge Victorian office with the editors - who were also frightening - and no-one else."

But soon he was tasting death himself, at first hand. The bomb, an IRA device which exploded prematurely, catapulted the former George Heriot's schoolboy into the real world faster than he might have expected. He arrived at the shopping arcade to find a scene so disturbing that he can remember it vividly three decades on.

"There was a woman who had been hit by a plate glass window and was covered in blood; there was a leg lying in the car park, blown off," he shudders.

"Nothing on my journalism training course gave me any idea of what to do next. So I stood there like a muppet, completely shocked, and wondered if I really was cut out for the job."

As it turned out, Esler was more than capable of accepting the role of hard-nosed reporter. Soon he learned to take the Troubles in his stride.

He might have been raised in the relative calm of a middle-class enclave between Currie and Balerno; swotted for his Highers in the prestigious surroundings of George Heriot's; whiled away his summers camping in the Lammermuir Hills then sailed through university in peaceful Kent, but the Eslers, it seems, are made of stern stuff.

He had his first brush with the fragile line that divides life and death when he was only a few weeks old. Born in Glasgow where his parents were living at the time, the baby boy soon showed signs of dehydration.

Doctors quickly found a stomach problem, operated and saved Esler's life - an act that inspired the youngster to dream of the day he too would become a doctor.

His parents arrived in Edinburgh three years later where his father, Bill, worked as manager of a building company overseeing major construction projects, while mother Georgina looked after Gavin and sister Ann. It was, Esler recalls, "a wonderful childhood".

"I had all the advantages of the country and all the advantages of the town," he says. "I lived in the country but could be in town within 20 minutes by bus.

"My first day at Duddingston Primary is probably my first memory. I remember arriving on my first day. Miss Darling - who was lovely, just lovely - was the teacher and it was her last year as she was about to retire.

"The school books, though, must have been about 50 years old. The ABC book started with A for apple then got to the letter 'G' for gas globe, and I remember wondering what on earth a gas globe was. They hadn't been around for decades."

He won a scholarship to George Heriot's when he was just seven and remained until he was 17 - staying on in Edinburgh with friends' parents even when his family opted to risk rising concerns over horrific sectarian violence and decamp to Northern Ireland.

The young Esler was planning to pursue that childhood dream and head for medical school at Edinburgh University until, suddenly, he realised he'd rather write.

"I was torn because I always wrote a lot for the school magazine or I'd make up my own little magazines. Then I had this crisis and thought I wouldn't do medicine after all, that I was going to be a journalist and a writer," he recalls.

"It was a complete panic because I'd spent my teenage years thinking I was going one way, and then I decided to go another." Today, of course, Esler is among the most familiar newsroom faces on the BBC - despite his original applications to join the corporation being rejected.

He juggles a gruelling workload that includes three shifts in the Newsnight hotseat every week - an exhausting stint that runs from 9.30am until midnight in which he is every bit as persistent in his search for answers from unwilling guests as his co-presenters Kirsty Wark and, of course, the infamous Jeremy Paxman.

In fact it was Esler's tackling of MP George Galloway in 2005 over the London bombings that prompted hundreds of complaints to the BBC over his apparently overly rude and aggressive manner.

"We're never encouraged by the producers to ask questions in any way," he insists. "The most important thing to be is authentic and to be yourself. If I feel someone has answered a question then I'll move on. If I feel it's important enough, I will pursue the question.

"Viewers don't like rudeness, but they like us to be persistent. If I'm given the brush-off, that means a million people at home watching are getting the brush-off too, and they don't want to hear someone avoiding the question."

Alongside Newsnight, he also tackles various Radio Four programmes, spells on the BBC News channel and network current affairs programme Dateline London. All of which means it's a wonder the 55-year-old has time for much else.

Yet clearly he does. In between all that he's written four novels, as well as a factual account of American discontent, drawing on his role as the BBC's Washington correspondent in the mid-80s, which saw him eventually run the corporation's stateside coverage during the dramas of the George Bush and Bill Clinton eras.

Today Esler admits that the Clinton-Lewinsky saga partly influenced his latest work of fiction, A Scandalous Man.

The intriguing tale of sex scandal, enmeshed with political power and a fractured father-son relationship, will bring the newsman home to Edinburgh in August for an appearance at the International Book Festival.

He insists he's not a workaholic and family demands in recent years have clearly put life's priorities into perspective.

He wrote movingly three years ago about his late mother falling victim to Alzheimer's disease, describing her gradual loss as like watching the sun set in summer in the Highlands.

"You know it is getting darker and darker until finally the sky is totally black," he said, "but you are hard-pressed to say exactly when all light was extinguished."

More recently, he has witnessed perhaps the biggest challenge of all: his 16-year-old daughter Charlotte's fight against Hodgkin's lymphoma which, two years ago, she turned into a report on the TV news show for which her father is best known. "It was a difficult time but she's doing very well now," says Esler with a note of relief in his voice.

But there's really no escaping his role in the most watched news programme on television - and right now Esler can't imagine a more stimulating environment.

"This is a great time to be presenting a current affairs and news programme," he says. "There is the most interesting American election in my lifetime; a hugely interesting political situation in Britain with Gordon Brown and how he will do over the next two years; and the Westminster relationship with the Scottish Parliament and Alex Salmond. It's actually really good fun."

A Scandalous Man by Gavin Esler is published by Harper Collins in hardback, GBP 17.99. The Edinburgh International Book Festival runs from August 9-25.

Edinburgh Evening News June 13, 2008

PEOPLE: Irvine Welsh in tramspotting....

HE'S always been on the radical side, a "shock horror" voice that rails against middle-of-the-road convention with a literary style known for drawing back the veil on genteel Edinburgh, exposing its rancid, drug-fuelled underbelly.

Author Irvine Welsh comes stamped with the warning that, at some stage, he's going to blurt out something that makes you stop, stare wide-eyed for a moment and wonder if you heard right.

But it's true. Welsh, the man who made Trainspotting a global phenomenon, is now into a different kind of transport.

For Trainspotting, read tram- spotting.

"I can see the headlines in the Evening News," he laughs, "Irvine Welsh loves trams!

"I must be the only person in Edinburgh who actually does love the trams. But I think it's a great idea. Okay, they've made a complete a**e of it, but if Edinburgh wants to be a modern European city, it needs trams."

Of course, the fact that the enfant terrible of Scottish literature - who's done more to highlight Edinburgh's blemishes than most - has now thrown his support behind the beleaguered trams project is bound to be a headline in waiting. Particularly as he's here in Leith, where he was born, the part of town that's arguably suffered the brunt of the trams fall-out.

But he's not made this flying visit home from his Chicago base simply to offer his opinion on modern urban transportation. Instead, he's sitting in the cafe of a Leith drill hall, now Out of the Blue, where he hasn't ventured since his Boys' Brigade days, surrounded by starry-eyed young thespians desperate to be introduced to their literary hero.

"I had a Trainspotting poster on my wall for years. It's amazing that he's here to give us his backing," says Duncan Kidd, 27, from Newington, one of a group of writers and actors from Leith-based Strange Town theatre company, which has just received the stamp of approval from surely the highest profile supporter they could have ever hoped for. For Welsh to lend his support to the company's first foray into appearing at the Fringe, it's a no-brainer.

Strange Town - a theatre company for young people aged from just eight to 25, who not only act in and produce their own shows but also create all their own material - could well produce the next generation of city-raised writers and performers.

"I was astonished to find they wrote, produced, directed and acted in all their own shows," says Welsh. "I've seen what they've done and was really chuffed to be asked to help out.

"What's incredible is that they've got no funding, they get on with things rather than make a big song and dance about it. But this is a fantastic resource for young people in this area."

This, he adds, isn't just a creative outlet for those with leanings towards stage and screen. Indeed, the drama company set up by former Lyceum theatre education development officer Steve Small and his Festival Theatre counterpart Ruth Hollyman could, Welsh suggests, provide a grounding for its young participants' entire futures.

"Kids used to leave school and work in the shipyards or in Ferranti but all that's gone," Welsh points out. "It's the entertainment industry and creative industry, things that are internet driven, that are expanding.

"And even if these young people don't go on to be writers or actors or work in theatre, all the communication and entrepreneurial skills they pick up here are transferable. Think what could be achieved if groups like this actually got some money."

If he's frustrated at the financial challenges facing arts and culture at grassroots, it's nothing compared to the patience he's had to draw on while he has waited - and waited - for his latest venture into the world of the silver screen to actually come to fruitition.

But within weeks the film adaptation of his 1996 trio of short stories, Ecstasy, will finally arrive at a cinema near you - a whole decade in the making.

"Ten years," Welsh, 52, groans with a roll of his eyes. "But we've had confirmation that Ecstasy has been selected for the Toronto Film Festival, the biggest film festival in the world, in September. And it'll be out here in October. But it's taken a ridiculous time."

The reason is depressingly simple. "There's no real film industry in Britain any more," he shrugs. "Scottish Screen [now Creative Scotland] has some money to develop scripts but it can't write a cheque for GBP3 million or GBP4m to make a film. You need to be casting big names to pull in that kind of money - and that's very hard here.

"So it has to be done through big agents in America. But we were beating our heads against a wall for ages.

"It's sad, it breaks my heart. Right now, I'm writing a film for American TV, which is great fun, but I want to do things here, where I came from and I can't." It means Ecstasy, starring Small- ville's Kirsten Kreuk and Lord of the Rings' Billy Boyd and set at the height of the Nineties' rave scene, was largely filmed in Canada with extras for the movie picked from local people who had to fake Scottish accents and with just the exterior scenes shot in Edinburgh.

Yet while there's a drug-fuelled flavour that may seem like an extension of Trainspotting, this is a film which casts the city in a much more aesthetically pleasing light.

"There are some beautiful shots of Leith," says Welsh, whose 1993 novel and the subsequent film adaptation by Danny Boyle left some in the city reeling with its mortifying depiction of city junkies, sink estates and vomit-strewn pavements.

"The shots are actually so good that the Scottish Tourist board asked if they could use the publicity posters for Ecstasy - they definitely didn't do that for Trainspotting. They're even going to be involved in some of the launches.

"How times change. But some of the shots of the Edinburgh skyline in the film are absolutely fantastic."

The film is, he confirms, definitely worth waiting for. Even ten years.

"It's a strange film, very crafty," he adds. "It's promoted as a cinematic sequel to Trainspotting - what heroin was in the Eighties, ecstasy was in the nineties. So the first half hour is like Trainspotting, there's this very charismatic lead guy, but then it becomes a love story." But while one chapter closes, another begins.

Ecstasy's launch will be followed in January by the US-backed filming of Filth, his 1998 novel which, like most of his other books, shocked - this time with its depiction of a coke-addicted, sexist police officer. Again, its painful gestation period has stretched to around a decade.

In between all that, he's working on the screenplay for a new HBO-based pilot programme inspired by a documentary about Irish gypsy families, who settle their disputes with bare-knuckle fist fights.

That's due to hit the screens in Spring and, if all goes to plan, will be rolled out as a series.

Yet while work and life is played out across the Atlantic these days, it seems there's nowhere quite like home. Chicago may be where he's based, but it's Leith - and, in particular, Easter Road - that he holds dearest.

And just like any Hibs' fan, he keeps one eye firmly on what's happening across town.

With Hearts fans for relations, Welsh has enjoyed a week exchanging pleasantries over the latest Gorgie Road fall-out.

"The texts have been going back and forward and they've been getting a bit of stick. But really, they love all this 'Mad Vlad' stuff.

"They're Hearts fans," he adds with a wicked grin. "They absolutely love being miserable."

Edinburgh Evening News August 4, 2011

PEOPLE: Stark Reality Yes..Reality TV No Thanks

DAVINA McCALL is yelling into her microphone, wind whipping her hair into her face and a squealing, near hysterical mob is behind her brandishing their banners and shouting "out, out, out".

It's the celebrity version of the Big Brother reality show, a nation has been gripped - almost - for several weeks as the likes of model Caprice, rapper Kenzie, racing pundit John McCririck and astrologer Jackie Stallone bitched and backstabbed their way to eviction.

"And the winner is..." bawls Davina. "Irvine!"

Okay, it was really Happy Mondays dancer Bez, but if the producers of the hit Channel 4 show had had their way it could have been Edinburgh's infamous literary export, Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, exiting the Big Brother house to be met by a posse of photographers and cheque for GBP 50,000.

And enfant terrible Welsh, who turned his experiences of Edinburgh's drug culture and council schemes, wayward characters and colourful language into the blueprint for the country's most stolen book and DVD, might have added Celebrity Big Brother winner to his already glowing CV.

There was just one problem, a fatal flaw in the Big Brother producers' masterplan. When it comes to reality television, Welsh is hardly its biggest fan.

"I was offered Celebrity Big Brother, the one that Bez won. Never watched a bit of it. And I was asked to do that celebrity one in the jungle as well," he reveals, referring to I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, hosted by cheery chaps Ant and Dec.

"I was actually tempted. The wife thought it might be quite nice to spend a few weeks put up in a six-star hotel in Australia, but the show itself, naw, she was very against it as well.

"These aren't the kinds of things I'd think about doing. If ever I did, it would be because I was desperate for money. But then I see Iggy Pop on TV selling insurance," he continues, "and Johnny Rotten's head on a cow advertising butter and think 'you can't be that skint'.

"Maybe people get to a point in life where they need that affirmation of being out there. Find it quite strange myself..."

So no chance of Welsh hitting the screens chewing on a crocodile's most intimate bits or, as former MSP Tommy Sheridan was seen recently, wearing a skintight Tory blue Lycra catsuit enduring electric shocks in the nether regions every time his fellow contestants failed a Big Brother test.

Instead, Muirhouse-raised Welsh will be hitting the screens from the other side of the camera, directing the short film he co-wrote which owes just a little of its genetic make-up to the reality shows and the minor celebrities who populate them - both of which he's come to despise.

The result is Good Arrows, the first comedy drama from Dust Films, the production company he has launched with former music journalist and long-term collaborator Dean Cavanagh, his writing partner on theatre drama Babylon Heights and television one-off Wedding Belles, among several others.

"We wanted to look at this obsession with celebrity, but not in an obvious way, just having a laugh and a joke about it," he explains. "We were thinking about darts. Thing is though, darts is difficult to satirise because it's 'hyper-real' anyway. So we decided to do it about our obsession with minor celebrity culture, portraying the darts world as a background to it."

It's his way of sticking his middle finger up to today's television executives, the ones who trot out reality shows, talent contests and intrusive shock documentaries for an audience he reckons deserves better.

"I feel sorry for the youth of today," adds Welsh, in real years aged 50 but, he insists, mentally still 26 with a rebellious punk streak. "They get middle-aged television executives deciding what they should watch."

Welsh might be middle-aged himself, yet he reckons he's more in tune with today's youth than some. And there are plenty out there who are happy to tune in to the latest Welsh production - whether it's a novel, a television one-off or the long-awaited film sequel to his debut and so far most popular work, Trainspotting.

Published in 1993 it blew the lid off genteel Edinburgh's drug-soaked underbelly in a cacophony of obscenities that reached a peak with its movie adaptation three years later. So mortified were some by the depiction of city junkies, that the movie prompted letters to newspapers declaring it "obscene" and one cinema to refuse to show it - the Dominion in Morningside said it wasn't what its audience wanted to see.

Still, it became a launch pad for Welsh to become one of his generation's most popular writers - even if it set the bar impossibly high for his successive works.

"From a creative point of view, it was a godsend," he insists. "You know you have an audience for what you do. If I'd written a book that had died a death I might have been inclined then to write a more commercial book or go into genre writing romance or crime.

"That stamp of affirmation meant I was able to develop in a more naturalistic way rather than a contrived way of embracing genres and thinking 'how can I sell this book?'.

"Trainspotting is the best commercially but you'd have to be a fool to think it's the best I've ever done. You always want to improve."

Some critics have failed to embrace his later works in quite the manner fans adopted Trainspotting as their bible, making the book one of the most stolen novels in Britain, the DVD one of the most nicked.

Yet for some it revealed a side to the Capital they hardly recognised.

"Cities are not one-dimensional places," he argues. "Edinburgh is not about people doing smack in shooting galleries or people sitting in a wine bar after a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Festival, or Morningside ladies sipping tea in Jenners. Edinburgh is all that and it's a million more things.

"Look at Edinburgh from its whole inception - people crowded in tenements in the Old Town, there's doctors on top, carpenters in the middle, labourers on the bottom. Then you had the New Town - the first middle-class suburb with all the professionals and the Old Town was a working-class ghetto."

Trainspotting, however, could only have been played out in the communities of Muirhouse and Leith, he insists. "There were certain things in Edinburgh at the time, particularly with heroin and HIV.

"It's an open secret that breaches in security at the pharmaceutical plant at Westfield Road meant all this pharmaceutical heroin was on the streets. There was that mass unemployment of the era kicking in, which happened in every city, but there was this surge of heroin that you didn't have elsewhere to the same extent.

"The port culture of Leith, the hard-drinking culture of whisky shorts rather than beer which meant people are into getting a hit of something and use needles rather than chase heroin.

"The 'Aids capital of Europe' thing, another myth but it all happened at once in Edinburgh."

He's now woven into the fabric of the city but apart from a foothold flat where he stays during visits to watch Hibs, home now is Dublin and Miami where he enjoys a millionaire lifestyle far removed from the drugs-saturated madness of Trainspotting.

Difficult then to reconcile his image as anti-hero of the chemical generation with comfy middle-aged health-conscious balding millionaire who worked as a trainee in the housing department of Edinburgh City Council and was once considered by his fellow MBA students at Heriot-Watt as a dead cert to make it big - in local government.

"You are what you are," he retaliates. "I can be sitting with buddies in a grotty bar in Leith Walk or a cocktail bar in Miami with supermodels. To people looking in it seems weird, to me it's just hanging out with friends, I don't think about it. I've got circles of friends in a lot of places, some might have more money, others have different values but they all get up, eat, go to the toilet...

"Do I get aggravation in Edinburgh? Naw," he sneers.

"My mates are hard and will kick f*** out of anyone who messes with me."

Good Arrows is on ITV4 on January 31 at 11pm

LIFE OF A LEITHER

IRVINE WELSH was born in a tenement in Leith in 1958. His family later lived in prefabs in West Pilton and a maisonette flat in Muirhouse.

He went to the now defunct Ainslie Park High School and left aged 16 to do a course in electrical engineering.

Welsh left for London aged 17 where he got a job with Hackney Council. He profited during the London property boom, renovating and then selling properties.

He returned to Edinburgh to work at the city council housing department and study for an MBA at Heriot-Watt University.

Trainspotting was published in 1993 and made into a film three years later. Welsh has written ten books as well as various stage plays and films.

Edinburgh Evening News Jan 26, 2009

PEOPLE: Mickey battles through the pain.

THERE'S a definite limp and a slight grimace as Hibs legend Mickey Weir rises from his seat and attempts to make his way down a steep set of stairs.

"It's not that bad, really," he says with a shrug. It's certainly a lot better than it was. To be honest, I'm over the worst of it. Now I want to get back to doing what I want to do - football."

Having endured more than two years trapped at home in the west of the city, a gnawing back injury has achieved something that many opposition players failed to do - floor the nippy wee winger and knock him out of the game he loves.

The pain has been crippling, almost certainly the result of years spent pushing his slight frame to the absolute limit, playing top-flight matches when he should have been sitting them out.

He endured the aches and pains in his legs, his groin - all over - until nearly three years ago when doctors finally told him his back was a complete mess and it needed to be fixed. The result is he now has a metal plate in his back, inserted to help keep it straight.

"It's holding it together," he explains. "The bones were all over the place. I was at Cowdenbeath coaching at the time, but it got worse and worse. I couldn't run, I couldn't do anything."

Injuries were part and parcel of his career as a player, but this - affecting him at the age of 40 as he tried to carve out a career in a new area of the game - was a bitter blow. He had to quit coaching and there followed terrible, painful days when he could hardly walk.

It was physically draining, but worse than that, it tested his mental fortitude to the limit.

Pilton lad Mickey, green and white through and through, with a League Cup medal to his name and 20 years of football coursing through his veins, suddenly found himself barely able to lift himself out of his chair.

"My youngest, Harrison, had just been born," he remembers. "On the plus side, it meant I got to spend a lot of time with him, but on the other hand I could hardly walk. It was a horrendous time for me, the most difficult time of my life.

"I wouldn't say I was depressed, but I got very low and it got very hard to get out of bed in the morning. My wife, Michelle, was an absolute rock, she kept my head up."

He waited a year for the operation and since then has followed doctors' orders and spent 18 months resting. The pain might still be niggling, but not enough to stop the father of two returning to the beautiful game - even if it is, for the time being at least, behind a microphone.

These days, the pocket dynamo who steered Hibs to a 1992 League Cup and who many Hibbees regard as one of Easter Road's legends is carving a career as an online pundit, working the chat show format with fellow ex-Hibbee Joe Tortalano, former Hearts legend Gary MacKay and ex-Talk 107 sports show host Gordon Dallas.

"I'm loving it," he grins, referring to Kickabout, a weekly podcast football show that started just a few weeks ago but has already attracted listeners from around the globe.

"It's been fantastic for me to get involved in. What I really like is that it's not people sitting about complaining about the game and being negative about it. It's about having some fun - the kind of terracing and changing room banter that football used to be all about before it all got so serious."

Yet serious is what he has been about his sport since the days when he and his younger brother would play footy in the garden of their parents' Mary and Matthew's Pilton home and end up scrapping over who kicked what when.

"I've always had a competitive edge," he nods. "I think when you come from a not-so-great background, you end up with a bit of a chip on your shoulder. I was told by so many people that I was too wee to make it in the game, I suppose it pushed me on. There's a bit of the 'small guy' syndrome about me, I always want to win."

Still, he could easily have grown up hooked on something more destructive than winning. The Pilton of his youth offered few opportunities other than gangs, thieving, booze and drugs - more than a few of his friends opted for one or the other, and some didn't survive.

"I ran around with people who did all that stuff, but I knew when to walk away," he says before adding that he's never drunk alcohol - not even when he helped Hibs to that League Cup victory.

"For a start, my dad made it clear he didn't want the police at his door for anything and I had too much respect for my family to go down that road. I remember running with a gang once. A lot of us turned up to meet another gang and two or three of my mates took a severe beating. I saw that and knew it wasn't for me.

"I lost friends to drugs," he adds. "Bad enough for them to die, but awful too for the ones left behind. One friend was a real straight talker, the kind of bloke who, when everyone else was saying the referee had been harsh with me, he'd be saying, 'well it was your own fault, you did this or that and you shouldn't have'. I lost him through drugs.

"He told me once, 'you've got a chance to be something, don't end up like me on drugs, this isn't a life for anyone', but some people can't discipline themselves out of it. Some of the best footballers around are sitting about in pubs or at the bookies because they didn't use their talent."

It's a message he now takes to young people who might be on the brink of making disastrous choices, pushed towards a life of missed opportunities through peer pressure or just because no-one's ever told them there's an alternative.

"Kids listen to people who have been through it," he points out, "they want to hear from people like myself, ex-sportsmen and women. There's an opportunity there to get to these kids before they lose their chance."

At the other end of the scale, he despairs at the rise of the over-enthusiastic pushy parents who yell at kids from the football sidelines and youth team coaches who live out their own football fantasies through a team of nine-year-olds.

He also yearns for the days when it didn't cost a week's household budget to watch games.

Worse though, he can hardly believe that after more than 25 years in the game, he's now having to jump through hoops to gain the SFA badges he needs to pursue the next stage of his career - coaching.

"I was angry at the start. In my opinion no bits of paper can replace sheer experience, but you've just got to bite the bullet and get on with it."

That never-say-die attitude has got him where he is today. Weir's back provides a shot of pain as he stands up and he winces slightly.

"My approach in the game was to never leave anything on the pitch, to give it everything I could," he shrugs. "That's why I'm in the state I am.

"It was madness, my body couldn't sustain what was needed to play at the level I wanted. The heart was there but the body couldn't take it - but I wouldn't have changed it for the world."

Four Kickabout podcasts are available every Tuesday on www.kickaboutscotland.com

FROM MILLWALL TO MOTHERWELL

MICKEY WEIR joined Hibs, the club he had supported as a youth, from Portobello Thistle as a teenager.

His apprentice role involved football training but also maintaining the Easter Road ground, including sweeping the terracing and painting the woodwork.

"I'd never really wanted to be a professional footballer," he admits. "But Portobello Thistle was run by a great man, George Johnson, who, along with some others, encouraged me to forget about my height and concentrate of my game," says Weir.

"I was 16 years old and playing with Pat Stanton, one of my childhood heroes. My first game with the Hibs first team was among the greatest achievements of my life."

He came from a long line of Hibs fans, which meant his apprenticeship duties were a labour of love.

He remained at Hibs until 1987 when he signed for Luton Town only to return to Easter Road after a few months and just eight appearances.

He ended up instrumental in the side's 1992 League Cup win against Dunfermline.

He left in 1996 for a brief spell on loan to Millwall before ending his playing career at Motherwell. There followed a stint coaching at Cowdenbeath before being forced to take time out through injury.

Edinburgh Evening News: April 7 2009

PEOPLE: Footballer Peter Marinello: I got a gun and went after him"

FAME and fortune shone on Peter Marinello. Gifted with a natural footballing talent, he had the added advantage of striking looks, a fun-loving personality and a sharp fashion sense that had the girls hooked.

No wonder he quickly became known as Scotland's George Best.

It was 1970 and the world was at his feet. The 19-year-old Hibs winger, so inventive and confident on the park, was on the cusp of greatness - Arsenal had just paid £100,000 for him, and he was in demand to appear on Top of the Pops and as a fashion model.

Life looked on course to pan out perfectly for a lad raised in a Broomhouse prefab, who honed his soccer skills on the nearest stretch of spare ground.

Sadly, though, the "George Best" tag was to prove uncannily accurate: soon Peter Marinello's name would go down in history among those players for whom football greatness became a curse.

Today, he lives in Bournemouth, his football revolves around encouraging his 20-month-old grandson Matthew to kick and not pick up the ball. "I think he's going to be a goalie," grins Peter.

He's 59 now, with a hip replacement and a lot of time on his hands to reflect on how that fresh-faced teenager who signed for Arsenal ended up broke and caught toting a handgun, intent on wreaking revenge on the business partner who shattered his dreams.

"I look back on it all and I see where I made mistakes," he nods. "I was naïve, I let people take advantage of me. I got involved with people I shouldn't have.

"I was skint, my wife was ill and I'd lost everything. And you go a little crazy when that happens."

He was just 15 when he signed for Hibs, having first shrewdly warned them that England legend Stanley Matthews wanted to sign him for Port Vale.

In fact, Hibs were the only team he wanted to play for. "I was a Hibs fan - my family were living in Logie Green at that time. I'd supported Hearts when we were in Broomhouse but you learn which team to follow when you move to Leith."

He loved the club and times were good, although at times - as was to become the regular case with Marinello - downright bizarre.

At the age of 18 and despite his best efforts still a "good" Catholic boy, he would join his Hibs teammates on a tour of Nigeria and Ghana, just as the Biafran War was breaking out.

Team-mate Jimmy O'Rourke decided to give him a late 18th birthday present he'd never forget - the loss of his virginity to a local "lady of the night", all the while egged on by a crowd of around 20 Hibs team-mates, seated, cheering, in a half circle around the bed.

It wasn't the only memorable moment of the tour - Marinello later recalled arriving at an island in Ghana where the lads spotted some locals' canoes and began messing around with them.

"Amused they were not," recalled Peter in his biography, Fallen Idle. "It was even less funny when I was snatched and frogmarched 200 yards.

"The local fishermen were convinced that we had damaged their boats and they indicated that, unless Hibernian Football Club were prepared to foot the bill for repairs, they could kiss goodbye to Peter Marinello."

He was restrained, hands tied behind his back while the team haggled for 40 anxious minutes before accepting the demands.

A year later as he signed for Arsenal to become one of the highest-paid players in the game, Marinello must have believed that life in London surely couldn't be quite as bizarre . . .

"I was still upset at leaving Hibs," he recalls. "I was enjoying myself, I had a few bob, I liked buying nice suits and going out for a drink with the Hibs team.

"Willie MacFarlane, the Hibs manager, said I was getting out of control, he brought in another player and I was the last to know I was being sold."

His three years at Arsenal would often prove frustrating football-wise, but London offered bright lights and endless opportunities to relieve him of his earnings.

The birth of his first son, Paul, in 1972 - a year before he shunned Arsenal's pleas and moved to Portsmouth - was to have a resounding impact on his life. It plunged his wife, Joyce, into post-natal depression which would evolve into a lifelong struggle.

Her condition wasn't helped, perhaps, by her husband's off the pitch activities. Drinking - he once said he didn't have "a favourite drink, as long as it was wet" - gambling and unfortunate business investments were eating into his big money salary.

His journeyman career took him to Motherwell and America before he returned to Edinburgh, this time in a maroon jersey and the beginning of the end for a player who once held so much promise.

"I was fine about going to Hearts," he recalls. "I'd been raised in that part of town and it was part of my childhood. The fans were good to me, too."

Edinburgh, his hometown, seemed to offer a chance to finally settle and Marinello set about putting down business roots. He converted a house with a friend and, buoyed by that success, took on another property and dipped his toe into a trade he knew well.

"I bought a couple of pubs, one in Lauriston Place, the other in Leith Walk," he recalls.

Marinello played 36 times for Hearts - scoring on five occasions - between October 1981 and March 1983, when his old Hibs team-mate, Peter Cormack, signed him for Partick Thistle. Injury, however, put paid to his career just as the business behind his pubs started to collapse.

"I was too trusting," he recalls. "I started making big mistakes."

Haunted by the loss of hundreds of thousands of pounds, Marinello lost himself in booze and at the bookies. Money was running out. His final make-or-break deal was a £150,000 investment in a Spanish nightclub.

"My wife was in hospital and I was looking after two kids," he recalls. "We ended up with nowhere to stay, so we lived at Butlin's in Skegness while we waited and waited for the money.

"But I'd made a contract with a conman. He disappeared and I wasn't going to get my money."

Pushed to the edge, he finally snapped. It wasn't hard to find someone in London to supply him with a handgun and point him towards his ex-business partner.

"It was a replica," insists Marinello today. "It was just a scare tactic. All I wanted was to get my money back."

A few days later police came knocking and today Marinello knows he was lucky to escape it all with a stern warning.

Marinello's football career is overshadowed by bankruptcy, that handgun incident and a reputation for booze and business failures.

"I'm a devil may care person," he shrugs. "I was young and stupid and I had too much money and time on my hands. But there were some bloody great times too.

"Would I change it?" he grins, "not a bit of it."

Fallen Idle by Peter Marinello is published by Headline.

MODELS, nightclubs and footballers have proved a potent mix ever since George Best was in his heyday at Manchester United.

But rarely more so than in the case of Hearts' Chilean striker Mauricio Pinilla, who had to flee his home country to escape the pursuing press pack after finding himself at the centre of a sex scandal.

It was an alleged hotel-room liaison with Maria Jose Lopez, the glamorous model wife of his international captain Luis Jimenez, that sparked the furore three years ago.

Shortly afterwards, a fracas ensued when the 23-year-old and Jimenez turned up at the same Santiago nightclub. Pinilla left the club pursued by local reporters and swiftly booked flights to Mexico to escape their attention.

Across the city, the booze-fuelled party lifestyle of Hibs' Russell Latapy was as famous as his wizardry on the pitch.

As he was starting out on his career, he shared a house in Trinidad with fellow footballer Dwight Yorke and cricket star Brian Lara. The natural competition between the three sportsmen extended to their pursuit of women, Latapy once admitted.

His close friend Yorke was at his side when his Hibs career came to an inauspicious end in May 2001.

The pair were returning to Latapy's New Town flat from the Mercado club in the West End with two women when his Volkswagen Beetle was spotted weaving on to the wrong side of Kerr Street.

Latapy was charged with drink-driving, less than 48 hours before a derby match, and was duly sacked by the Easter Road club.

Rangers immediately stepped in to take advantage, by snapping up the wayward talent.

Edinburgh Evening News August 6, 2009

PEOPLE: Olivia's Mission to help amputees stand tall

TEN years had gone by since the young man with the dazzling smile was last able to raise himself up. Yet now here he was, although a bit wobbly, standing tall.

He'd travelled 8km over dusty dry roads, dodging potholes and rocks in his battered wheelchair to get there. He was 34 years old and since the road accident a decade earlier tore both his legs off at mid-thigh, he'd married, become a father and dreamed of this day when he might just possibly stand straight again.

Olivia Giles watched the joy spread over his face as the new artificial limbs which were about to change his life in the most dramatic manner imaginable, were finally fitted.

"The look on his face was amazing," she recalls. "To see him standing up for the first time in ten years and to think that it had only cost us a small amount of money to do it, was incredible."

If anyone could empathise with how he was feeling, it was her. In February 2002, she left her job as a senior partner at a city solicitors' firm early, feeling like she was coming down with the flu.

In fact, she had life-threatening meningococcal septicaemia.

She woke in hospital a month later to discover both lower arms and her legs below the knee had been amputated in a desperate measure to save her life.

Seven years on, and thousands of miles and a gulf of differences separate her from David in his simple Zambian home. But just like him, she too walks tall on artificial limbs. And both know that without them, their lives would be so much harder.

"I remember myself standing up for the first time," she explains.

"I had been lying down for six months and finally there was this feeling of being upright and people at last seeing what height you are. The difference this piece of metal and plastic can make is the same for him and me: it's the difference of whether you have a life or not.

"It's the difference in getting from A to B by yourself, of having the independence of being able to stand up.

"That's such a 'human' thing, to be able to stand up and look someone in the eye."

Olivia is a striking blonde with a generous smile and razor sharp lawyer's mind which she has turned to helping Africa's neglected amputees like David through three projects - two in Zambia, one in Malawi - run by her Edinburgh-based charity, 500 Miles. Yet determined and persuasive as she is, even she is slightly ruffled by her latest and ambitious fundraising drive, Miles for Smiles.

In a fortnight's time, hundreds of walkers will set off a minute apart for a one-mile walk around the city's Festival Square area. The event is timed to last exactly 500 minutes and her dream is that every minute slot can be filled, so by the end of the day walkers will have covered the 500 miles - a reflection of her charity's name.

"I want it to be fantastic, but right now I'm just hoping people actually turn up. How many miles do you think I can ask my mum to do?" the 43-year-old laughs.

She may be worrying unnecessarily. For she's already signed up familiar faces like The Proclaimers - whose most famous song inspired her charity's name - along with television hosts, sports stars, entertainers and a string of others who have promised to be there on the day.

Like most that she meets, they've been hooked by her passionate explanation of the life-changing impact her charity can bring to lives dealt the double blow of crushing poverty and the misery of disability.

It's not easy to say no to someone as driven as Olivia Giles.

She had already helped front a successful meningitis awareness campaign when she decided to concentrate her efforts on an area that reflected more of her life now.

"My feeling was that amputees and disabled people with mobility difficulties are pretty well served in this country," she explains.

"I was aware that if I lived in another country, then it would not be quite like that."

Olivia, who uses artificial limbs to walk, arrived in Blantyre, Malawi, in January last year, to see its sole orthopaedic workshop and assess how she could help. The experience left her reeling.

"I was a total novice," she reflects. "Nothing prepares you for being there.

"There are so many demands, serious things like HIV, malnutrition, infant mortality," she explains.

"Rehabilitation for amputees is a really low priority."

The workshop survived on just GBP 1,800 a year and was producing only 200-250 devices for a nation with around 60,000 amputees.

"And the level of corruption was blatant and appalling," she adds.

Worse was the sight of pitifully poor people whose lives could be dramatically improved for an investment of just GBP 60, enough to buy them an artificial limb or support.

"You cannot have a life in a wheelchair over there," she says quietly.

"You can't join in socially if you can't walk. The quality of life is so low. Being able to move about is life-transforming."

She returned home depressed and unsure of where to start until a chance meeting with a charity worker from Glasgow with links to Malawi. They offered to provide old seagoing containers to create an orthopaedic workshop at the capital of Lilongwe. It opened, finally, at Easter after long negotiations with the Malawi government over how she could fund its future.

In its first week alone it made 65 devices and helped 43 patients. Soon people were travelling miles, dragging themselves along potted roads to get a life-changing artificial limb.

With the Malawi workshop spinning along, Olivia headed to neighbouring Zambia to strike a deal to fund staff training and boost output at an existing prosthetics workshop.

There she stumbled across an air medical service delivering vital orthopaedic help to isolated areas of the country which had just lost its sole source of funding.

Supporting FlySpec is now a vital area of her charity's work. Raising the funds - her charity relies totally on donations - is a challenge. But it's one that Olivia found she couldn't ignore.

She speaks movingly of a 16-year-old boy who she watched one day as he played football near to the Malawi workshop.

"He had trouble written all over his face," she laughs. "He was boisterous, he was having a great time. It was a surprise when I later found out that he had two below-the-knee prosthetic limbs that we had provided.

"It was fantastic to see the second chance at life these limbs had given him. Two pieces of metal, some plastic. That's all it is, a cheap fix that changes lives."

She adds: "I feel a sense of obligation that this is there to be done. If I don't do it, how do I live with myself? I've seen the need. If I don't do it how do I sleep at night?" she shrugs.

"Some things have your name on it."

A MILE IN YOUR SHOES

MILES for Smiles takes place on 3 October, when walkers will set off a minute apart between 11:20am and 7:30pm, covering a mile course around Festival Square.

It's hoped that each time slot can be filled - walkers must register beforehand - making a total of 500 miles walked.

Walkers can share their mile with friends and family, walk together in groups or even do their mile over and over again.

They'll be accompanied by music from bands, pipers and entertainers - and might even find themselves following in the footsteps of some celebrity faces.

To add to the fun, walkers are encouraged to complete their mile in unusual ways - in fancy dress, dancing the route, or in any quirky way they fancy.

There's no need to raise sponsorship to enter, but anything made will go to help projects run by 500 Miles.

Registration is easy and free. Simply go to www.milesfor smiles09.co.uk, e-mail your details to trish@500miles.co.uk or write to 500 miles, Box 500, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh EH10 4BF.

You can support the event by donating online at: www.justgiving.com/fivehundredmiles


Edinburgh Evening News September 18, 2009

PEOPLE: GRAY MAN SHOWS HIS COLOURS

THUMP. And again, thump. The man with the bright purple coloured tie, sitting in front of the bright primary colour splodges of a modern art painting on the wall of his office, is making his point by thumping his fist down on the table.

He's sitting in what can only be described as a compact office at Holyrood, the view from his window is of an uninspiring concrete wall built to withstand the blast of a terrorist's bomb and the memo board pinned next to the painting hints at work ahead: Japanese TV, says one impressive scribble.

His voice is getting louder. He's angry, passionate even. He's raging at his political foes and he's even putting the boot in.

Who can it be? Surely not Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray, a year into the job and still not known for his colourful nature or fiery temperament, a grey politician said to be so devoid of personality that some have likened him to having all the charisma of a turnip.

Yet here he is, fist thumping the top of a polished round table, driving home another point about how the SNP - and Alex Salmond, Enhanced Coverage LinkingAlex Salmond, -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newsin particular - are gradually dismantling Scotland with their myopic plan for independence.

"What we want to do," he declares in earnest, "is to make the Labour Party in Scotland talk again to Scotland.

"We want to lead," he thumps the table again, "and we will do that."

And so, acutely aware that he's not exactly the first person many voters think of when hit with the words "Scottish Labour politician", he's started his own national conversation.

While Alex Salmond Enhanced Coverage LinkingAlex Salmond -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newsand the SNP pour millions into their chit-chat about independence, Iain Gray has been down the shops, accosting women with their trolleys at Tesco and Morrisons on a kind of "getting to know you" tour of the sticks.

Dubbed "Iain's supermarket sweep" by him and his advisors, every now and again Gray heads off from the confines of his bomb resistant bunker in Holyrood to venture to places like Grangemouth and Greenock, to hover outside shops and corner passers-by about what they want him, his party and parliament to deliver.

Once he's told them who he is, of course.

It's part of a master plan to raise what is to many a fairly dire profile and, it appears, tap the man and woman in the street for ideas as to where Labour should concentrate its focus for Scottish Parliament elections in 2011.

So is this back-to-basics approach actually working?

"I'm definitely more recognisable," insists Gray, who just last week in one interview admitted that many Scots still don't have the foggiest idea who he is. "On a Saturday, I go out to buy a suit, someone will come up, they pick me out. If I go out on a by-election campaign, people recognise me.

"Look, I'm a year into the job," he adds, patience wearing thin. "Alex Salmond Enhanced Coverage LinkingAlex Salmond -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newshas been doing his job as leader of the SNP on and off for almost 20 years.

"Yes, this is a high-profile job and my profile has to be high - people have to know who you are - but the most important thing is to make sure they know what I stand for."

There are those who might suggest this 52-year-old grandad-in-waiting from Haddington could have substantially raised his profile had he held his nerve and pushed for a vote of confidence on the Scottish Government as they battled to justify the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber.

Others could point to his U-turn on predecessor Wendy Alexander's "bring it on" fighting talk when it came to the possibility of an independence referendum. Instead, Gray has preferred to avoid a head-on collision, talking most recently of the possibility of a poll at some point in the future.

And there are those who might wonder if, despite his insistence that "I'm my own man", he's still too deep in the pockets of his Westminster friends, a certain Mr Brown and Mr Darling, and perhaps even tarnished by them.

A steady hand on the tiller he may have been for the Scottish Parliament's Labour group after a chaotic period, but when a YouGov poll commissioned by the Nationalists recently put them eight points ahead of Labour in the constituency vote and four points ahead in the regional vote - enough, they say, to oust Gray and a trio of other Labour names in an election - then it starts to look serious.

"I speak up on apprenticeships, child protection, I spoke against the decision that Kenny MacAskill took to release the Lockerbie bomber," he insists. "I would rather be known for that than on the basis of who shouts the loudest.

"I don't like playground politics," he continues. "But if I'm up against Alex Salmond, Enhanced Coverage LinkingAlex Salmond, -Search using:News, Most Recent 60 DaysBiographies Plus Newsfor whom playground politics is meat and drink, then I'll take him on and I will stand up to him and take him to pieces to get to the truth of what he is doing."

Gray is, like the rest of his Labour Party cohorts showed at their annual conference in Brighton, in a fighting mood.

And so he sets about unpicking Nationalist policies, accusing them of wasting public money to fund their independence campaign.

There's no doubting his sincerity or his passion as he rages against the Nationalists' spending priorities: "Wasting money on the National Conversation, GBP 23 million for the Scottish Futures Trust which hasn't even commissioned a single report in two years," he fumes. "Education is the investment you make in our future and the SNP are making a complete shambles of it."

As he chats, his conversation is peppered with achievements that he and his colleagues have notched up over the Nationalists - including the Glenrothes by-election, pressure to improve Scotland's commitment to climate change measures and a boost for apprenticeships, a trade-off on the Nationalists' budget plans.

But until this time last year, when he was thrust into the leader's role made vacant by Wendy Alexander's departure, Hibs fan Gray was always a behind-the-scenes kind of bloke in a suit.

He joined the Labour Party in 1979, and became an MSP - leaving behind a past career as a teacher at Gracemount High and Oxfam's Scottish campaigns director - for Edinburgh Pentlands in 1999.

He instantly took on a deputy ministerial role in health under Donald Dewar's new devolved government.

As transport minister, he made nearly GBP 400m available for what was then intended to be Edinburgh's three-line tram network.

The 2003 election, however, saw defeat by then Scottish Tory leader David McLetchie. Gray went on to work as a special advisor to the Scottish Office under Alistair Darling while setting his sights on the 2007 election and his bid to become East Lothian MSP.

A year on from his election as Scottish Labour leader, and as he sits in this compact office - the Nationalists, he explains, snatched all the best ones - and his attention has turned to those supermarket shoppers in small towns around Scotland.

"There's a danger in parliament that everything becomes encompassed in this building and we lose contact with wider Scotland.

"So I have a rigorous programme of getting out of here, getting out of Edinburgh and Glasgow and going around Scotland," he says. "By the 2011 election, we will have policies that make sense to people whose votes we are seeking."

And, if operation supermarket sweep does its job, they might even know just who the chap in the purple tie is.

Edinburgh Evening News October 2, 2009

THE FORGOTTEN WAR

The Second World War... such a long time ago yet even today it throws up stories which remind us of its human impact.
Below is a mini series of stories hooked around one element of the war - the devastating consequences it had on one group of foreigners living here.
The Italian community - hard working people who had come to Scotland with their flavours of home seeking a better life from the poverty of their own villages - were rounded up, kept prisoner and treated as if they were the enemy of the state.
Caught up in that were ordinary people, a little boy who never got to know his father and, in contrast to the Italian element, a woman who faced legal shame for refusing to do what was seen as her 'duty'.
Poignant and deeply personal tales that remind us that war's grim reach stretches well beyond the field of battle.