Welcome to this special Leslie Riddick podcast, which is actually picking up on a really interesting event at the Independence Forum that was held in Perth at the start of June.

And there was a session there that was looking at culture.

It was absolutely fascinating and I wish it had been recorded.

It wasn't.

So here we are with the two protagonists of that event,

Stuart McCarty and Roger Emerson.

I'm just going to introduce them a wee bit,

but say hello, guys,

so we prove that we've got other living people in this.

Hello.

Hi there.

Right, the dead pan voice is Roger.

Stuart is the kind of cheerier guy. That's a wee warning, Roger. Stuart is a writer described as occasional broadcaster, storyteller. He's been active in Scottish culture throughout his life, music, poetry, language, folklore. And he's been director of the Scots language resource centre in perth president of the

pictish art society he's got loads of books the quest for arthur the quest for the nine maidens

and a really brilliant one uh tales of whiskey and smuggling the wild haggis and the green face

niaf so you can get from that that he switches between Scots and, well, actually, doesn't really just speak Scots.

Roger Emerson has worked in London, Newcastle-on-Town, mostly Edinburgh, running his own practice, Archimedia from 1987 to 99,

while he was also teaching architectural design at Edinburgh College of Art, also visiting

lecture at universities in Venice, Lisbon, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berkeley. So he's worked a lot

in architectural conservation and he's written a book, The Land of Stone, a journey through modern

architecture in Scotland, what I have in my hands here.

So if we can start off, Stuart, as I think we did in the actual event,

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