If I am lucky enough to call you a close friend, then there is every likelihood that we stood together on a picket line for a whole year during the longest and most bitter industrial dispute Scotland has known, with the exception of the miners’ strike.

At the heart of the walk out was not a wage demand, rather derecognition of the normally benign National Union of Journalists at an Aberdeen-based newspaper group.

So I can hardly complain about workers withdrawing their labour for a cause they believe in, because I did it myself.

And while I would wholeheartedly support those with a genuine grievance surrounding their pay, concurrent with the worst cost of living crisis I have ever known, the sympathy I have for nurses does not extend to train drivers.

Their union, ASLEF, is still embroiled in a campaign of industrial action in England and Wales which began two years ago. Two years!

They have continually rejected a pay offer which would take their salaries to a whopping £65,000 plus overtime and free travel for a four-day week.

Thankfully the Scottish Government negotiated a settlement to the dispute here. But you still face disruption if you jump on a train over the border.

My strike ended after a year because we had scant public support and management showed no signs of changing its tactics.

Therefore, in an almost identical denouement, the time is right for ASLEF members to do the same, count their blessings and stop disrupting the passengers who pay their wages.

It’s not often people get to my time of life without regrets about their careers.

I have only one, and that was that I never worked as a lobby correspondent at Westminster.

Since retiring as a journalist, I have been courted by several parties to stand as an MP, opening the possibility that I could have gone to the Commons on the other side of the fence. But when the chance came around, I was too old, and the vim and vigour I may once have possessed had vanished.

It’s an unusual life, I know. But despite the vagaries of loneliness, alcohol and the flesh, I promise you had I been elected, my manifesto promise would have been never to have taken photographs of my nether regions, send them to a complete stranger I had met on a dating app and compound the error by sending my pals’ private phone numbers as well.

MPs too often think they’re invincible, invulnerable and omnipotent. Roll on the election.

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the NASA Apollo programme fascinated me.

My parents woke me in the middle of the night to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon in 1969, but I was four and sadly can’t really remember it.

Subsequently, so rapt was I by the whole thing, I would endlessly draw spacemen in their goldfish bowl helmets and bulky backpacks.

Thereafter I consumed every book and TV programme about space, visited mission control in Houston and watched John Glenn’s space shuttle blast off from the Kennedy Space Centre.

Years later I bought an Omega Speedmaster, the watch astronauts wore on the Moon.

Space was my thing, and even today, I know an unhealthy amount of trivia about the planets and why we should be interested in them.

But I scoffed this week with news of Scots chasing a solar eclipse. Here? Fat chance. The sun was eclipsed by the spring weather.