It is my privilege to be a Deputy Lieutenant and the greatest honour that office bestows on me is that I lay a Remembrance wreath each year.

I try to remember the sacrifice of the fallen every day, not just for those few weeks when custom dictates we wear a poppy. Helensburgh being the military town it is, there will be many citizens, I am sure, who concur.

I arrived, as ever, at the Shandon war memorial early. As soldiers say, time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted, and I checked where wreath layers would be walking for potential slips and trips.

Then I returned to my car and sat in silence to contemplate why I was there and what it all meant. This was a sentience that got all the more focussed the closer it got to 11am.

(Image: Lesley Roberts) But this year it was different. Ordinarily, this was a moment of reflection I would have shared with dear old Dennis ‘Spike’ Jones, a Royal Navy veteran of World War Two and Korea, whose brother was lost on the Hood, and whose sprightliness and focus I remarked upon whenever we chatted, usually in these special moments before I laid my wreath.

He was a great character who always came to the Shandon ceremony.

Sadly Spike passed this year, not long after he marked his 100th birthday. I am privileged to have been his friend and I missed him very much as we remembered those who did not live as long a life.

It’s been said, and unkindly too, that I am the type of guy who opens the fridge door and when the light comes on, I start speaking.

That kind of barb just bounces off after 25 years in television news, an industry which ensures that if you don’t find a niche and make it your own, someone else will make it theirs.

Some years ago, when I had my first book published, I set up a Google alert for my own name.

Since then, not knowing how to turn it off, I’ve been bombarded with any and every tedious mention of people similarly-monikered. This week I received an alert about ‘Mike Edwards Bills.’

I assumed it was one of my tropes in this blatt about energy and privatised utilities ripping us off.

Imagine my chagrin when I learned that an American football team called the Buffalo Bills have a player called Mike Edwards.

Happily the alert told me he is about to hang up his helmet, so that’s one fewer namesake I’ll need to hear about.

There were absolute scenes, as the weans say, on the Corniche the other night because of some minor roadworks.

Minor they may have been, but the disruption they caused at the two busiest times of the day was epic.

Cars were nose to tail all the way between Helensburgh and Faslane as automated traffic lights took control.

And when seething motorists crawled by, their outrage was further fuelled by the fact that the shallow dimple in the road at the epicentre of the hiatus was totally unattended by staff working in the white heat of technology.

Instead of the dreaded unattended traffic lights, which are now such a regular part of the Helensburgh landscape they are surely worthy of UNESCO world heritage status, all that was needed was a couple of workies in high-vis jackets with stop/go boards, favouring the vast bulk of traffic coming from the base over the trickle going towards it the night before and vice versa, the morning after?