Scotland - Open for Business!

Well! No sooner had the ink dried on my emotional analysis of the mothballed dream scheme for Custom House Quay in Glasgow than a rescue plan was announced. 3DReid, those masters of pragmatism whose no nonsense commercial solutions march across our land, have stepped up to the plate to design a revised proposal for the embattled City Council. I can't wait to see the first impressions of this exciting and worthwhile project aimed at building where no one has built before! But there is more!

My attention was drawn yesterday to a proposal to build a £14,000/night billion pound resort at Kinloch Rannoch in Perthshire. Members of the exclusive club would be expected to have minimum liquid assets of £100 million. They would pay £2million up front to join, with annual dues of £500,000. A stay at the luxury hotel would start at £6,000 per person per night, rising to £14,000 for the best rooms. That will certainly keep the local riff-raff at bay - that's one in the eye too for the conservation lobby who are trying to preserve derelict stretches of old woodland scheduled for long overdue golf courses. Now while this fills me with almost unspeakable pleasure, in my expert opinion there are two flaws in the proposal - first of all, they've employed architects whose name I can't remember instead of someone good like 3DReid or Archial. Secondly, and this is where the architect's lack of vision really shows, they should have knocked down the adjoining village while they were at it as it is a well known dump of a place full of do-gooders and natives - ie troublemakers.

Anyway, this mouth-watering treat, together with the Trump development, Custom House Quay and the recent television documentary about Harris Tweed, demonstrate that Scotland and Auchterness are climbing the curve of success! Of course part of this means that amenity societies, local council planners, do-gooders and hippies just have to shut up and stop trying to oppose change and acknowledge that Scotland is Open For Business!