IT was one of my earliest sporting memories and as a pre-school child I sat glued to the TV watching luminaries like Mary Peters and Kip Keino compete at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.

I’m delighted to say that I met Keino a couple of times when the Kenyan long distance runner visited Glasgow to promote its games a decade ago.

They say you should never meet your heroes, and having been eviscerated by the rudeness of some of mine, I would generally concur.

However, Kip was an absolute gentleman and I enjoyed his company immensely.

In between those two events, I was a student in Edinburgh in 1986 when the competition rolled into the capital for a second time.

It was fun and games, literally, and the circus gathered arms and legs when it had to be bailed out by Robert Maxwell.

The Mirror newspaper magnate stepped in because of a financial shortfall caused by sponsors pulling out after more than half of the competing countries boycotted the event in protest at the Thatcher government’s support of South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Now, Scotland is about to hold a fourth Commonwealth Games after Australia pulled out of hosting the 2026 event on grounds of cost. It’s a good political stunt - Argentina did it with the World Cup in 1978 - as the SNP tries to recover from a calamitous General Election.

A big sporting event like this will shift focus, rally the troops and get the flags flying again, after the disastrous European football championships when Scotland fans partied hard, shouted and sang for their woeful team and won many friends - then came home and voted for a unionist party.

Game for the Games?

YOUR mind doesn’t have to be too febrile to wonder whether the Commonwealth Games organisers might chuck a few events our way if another Scottish competition gets the green light.

The sporting festival is slated to be a scaled down version of the 2014 event, with fewer categories of fewer events taking place in fewer venues.

The Glasgow games were a huge sporting and social success and the city really rose to the occasion.

The atmosphere in and around the dear green place during those days is not one I will forget.

Part of me wants to say Helensburgh could host events like police car counting, double parking or temporary traffic light erection. But that would be unkind.

However, the organisers could do a whole lot worse than placing events like rowing, swimming and dinghy-racing, which were previously held at Strathclyde Country Park, on Loch Lomond.

Especially if there are not going to be any flamingos to get in the way.

More to be done on migrants

WITH yet more tragic deaths in the English Channel this week, as huddled masses try to reach these shores protected by nothing more than a child’s swimming pool life ring, a new Westminster government tries a new tack to try to solve a crisis they cannot blame the old one for in perpetuity.

Pusillanimity is being cast aside and getting into bed with regimes we wouldn’t ordinarily want to know, might be part of the arrangement.

Italy’s right-wing government has done a deal with Albania which sees Tirana taking migrants who arrive on Italian beaches from north Africa and holding them until their cases are heard.

Australia has a similar scheme which is so successful, the numbers of illegal migrants has fallen dramatically.

It seems the offshore processing system works in principle. A comparable programme was introduced by the Conservatives and it may well be that swapping Albania for Rwanda might save lives.