I trust to luck. I am planning to be a millionaire before I die but I don't have a plan as to how that will happen.

It took me a while to get established - success didn't happen overnight.

I want to look beyond the legends, to find the real story of Scotland. And it's every bit as thrilling.

I worked on local papers, before taking a job as a webmaster with a very well known telecommunications company in London, as I thought the internet was the future.

After I graduated from the University of Glasgow, I was a self-employed archaeologist going from dig to dig around Scotland, and it was not well-paid. I was an excavator, not a lecturer as well, so paying rent on a flat was tricky. In the end I decided to retrain as a journalist as I couldn't see a future in it.

My father's example taught me self-reliance, to make my own luck, and to work to make things happen.

My father was a self-employed, commission-only salesman. He sold double-glazing and fitted kitchens, amongst other things. As he never declared himself unemployed, there was never recourse to benefits, so if money was tight, money was tight. It taught me that we were a closed unit, and that we had to be resourceful.