I'm Scottish. So there. Mallow courses through my veins along with Irn Bru. Perhaps not, but I grew up there and its brilliant. Lochs, mountains, castles...

I grew up miles away from that stuff in a new town made of concrete and weird green landscaped hillocks by the side of a dual carriageway. We did have this. Chocolate, mallow, jam and biscuit. Eaten in that precise order. And of course, most amazing packaging in the world.

After Sunday school my sister and I would, after carefully removing the teacake, flatten out the wrapper and painstakingly remove every wrinkle (working from the outside to the middle) until left with a super shiny sheet of foil, curving slightly at the edges. Sometimes we would then mould it or fold it into a shape. Very fiddly. Not having access to google in 1983 it would mostly be a very limited origami fortune teller.

Japan meets Scotland - land of the rising obesity levels.

I'm still obsessed with super fiddly detail and painstaking, high risk creations. Also all things Japanese.

This may be where it all started, so along with the other stuff I haven't finished yet, I'm going to be making some stuff about it...

A Valentines card to my hometown

I grew up in a Scottish newtown from age 5 - 18. It was a bizarre place in retrospect.

I love and hate it.

The first of 5 newtowns built in the 1950s, it embodies a utopian dream that the planners and architects had, but also some mistakes made by them in their first go at actualising it.

As Britain's first shopping mall, the original "Town Centre" really was, in my opinion, a building worth looking after.

the Toonie

Look at London's Barbican Centre or Southbank.

Southbank

Barbican

The Town Centre was built in the wrong place - on a dreich and blustery hill. Over the years, a series of bad planning decisions have left it crumbling and bookended by Tesco and Asda. The original building is more or less abandoned.

More on this stuff to come...