The House That Jack Built
I was walking through the car park of Great Glen House at nine o'clock this morning when a car slowed down beside me and a man with a beard poked his head through the window and made serious accusations about my reputation.
"So you must now be one of the great and the good of Inverness," said the man who, it turned out was our news reporter Iain MacDonald. He'd just finished a live report for Good Morning Scotland about the opening of the new Headquarters of . Relocating the agency from Edinburgh to Inverness has been a in these parts and the cost of the move has attracted criticism.
Today I was among over a hundred people in suits who'd been invited to watch First Minister Jack McConnell perform the opening ceremony. In his speech he touched on the personal issues faced by memebers of staff who'd had to decide whether or not to move their families to the north of Scotland. He also said that locating public organisations in places like Inverness gave school-leavers more job opportunities and meant they wouldn't have to head south to establish a career.
The building itself is an impressive structure with commanding views over the city and, apparently, had been built with "sustainable" matetials and designed to be energy-efficient. It also has one of the biggest bike-sheds I've ever seen. A local schoolgirl presented the First Minister with a seedling pine tree to take back to Edinburgh. This was meant to symbolise the work of SNH in maintaining Scotland's natural resources in rural areas and allowing them to flourish in the central belt of Scotland too.
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