Although a Helensburgh boy now, I lived, studied and worked in Edinburgh for long enough to have been surrounded and consumed by the Festival and Fringe.

You’ll understand that I am not the kind of guy to pay to watch a chainsaw-juggling unicyclist, and have spent happier afternoons with a supra-pubic catheter. That is until I was invited to host an event there this week.

And I have to say it was revelatory! I compered the launch of a book of war poems entitled Frontlines and Lifelines by General Tim Hodgetts, a senior Army surgeon. It was the real deal with rehearsals, lights and cameras, choirs and a band.

And it wasn’t until a moment before we went on stage that I was told the launch I was hosting was the final event of this year’s Fringe!

To make an amazing night all the more special was that it took place at Craiglockhart, the campus of Edinburgh Napier University where I studied journalism 40 years ago.

I didn’t know, until I got there as a callow teenager in 1984, that the building had been a hospital, and that the war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen had been treated there for the effects of shell shock.

In the hours before the event, on my first visit back in four decades, I retraced my jejune steps. An awful lot of water has flown under many, many bridges since I studied here, and it was fabulous to come back after a career as a journalist and a soldier.

I can’t say appearing at the Fringe was ever on my bucket list. But it was a fantastic experience and I am delighted to have done it! I’m clearing the diary for next year…

You’ve got to admire the chutzpah of the Prime Minister and his Labour cronies. They’ve barely re-arranged the ministerial furniture across Whitehall and already we’re getting it tight.

I keep my politics to myself, but I am all about the message. It is not a good message in the run up to an election to tell people that you will do great things once elected, and the instant you get the keys to the country, you do quite the reverse.

It’s an old hobbyhorse of mine that Scotland, as a huge producer of energy, should have tiny gas and electricity bills and the people who live here should benefit from their proximity to vast reserves onshore and offshore, above the waves and below them.

Instead, after promising there would be no austerity, the new government has ditched winter fuel payments for the elderly and now we see a massive 10 per cent energy price hike in the weeks ahead.

Sir Keir Starmer has also warned that October’s budget will be painful and blamed the convenient whipping boy of the previous government for giving it no option.

Scotland had its chance to free itself from Westminster’s vagaries a decade ago, but voted against independence. Its only chance for a second referendum was to continue to return more SNP MPs and MSPs time and again.

Instead, at this year’s General Election, Scotland voted for unionist parties, and the SNP lost seats by the truckload. Scottish independence is now dead in the water.

So what to do? Grin and bear it, that’s what. We voted for it, and it won’t change any time soon.