Book description
Late on a winter's night in 1976 at the age of 5, I lay awake in bed,
absolutely petrified. Something was causing a man to shout, swear and
bang in the lounge beneath my room. When I eventually went downstairs, I
found my elated Dad sitting in front of the last couple of minutes of
the football highlights on TV. He'd watched his team, Aberdeen, reach
the Scottish League Cup Final with a dramatic 5-1 victory over Rangers.
It was the first in a series of events that would forge an amazing
relationship with my Dad as we followed Aberdeen at home and away, for
the next ten years. It was a time when the enormous fan base of the Old
Firm rampaged through the streets and football grounds of Scotland. A
time when we watched Alex Ferguson's Aberdeen rise to the top of
Scottish and European football, and then fall all the way back down
again... I was born in Aberdeen in 1971, just as my Dad was about to
graduate from Aberdeen university with an honours degree in Geography.
Then in 1972, when he was unable to find work as a Geography teacher
locally, we moved to Perth, where I would spend my school years. As the
fortunes of Aberdeen FC waned in the late eighties, I left Perth High
School to pursue an HND in business studies with languages in Dundee.
Throughout the 1990s I worked regularly in Italy and France to improve
my command of the languages, I worked in hotels, in a cobblers, ironing
shirts in a dry-cleaners and writing reports on economic cooperation for
the local chamber of commerce. I then attended Strathclyde University to
do an honours degree course in International Business with modern
languages (IBML). This led to a career in financial services. Based
between London and Paris and working for American conglomerate General
Electric (GE Capital). I met my wife Catriona and in 2005, we came home
to Scotland, where we were both lucky enough to get good jobs in
Edinburgh. Shortly after that we moved to Linlithgow, got married in
2006 and our daughter Elodie arrived in 2008.
