I’VE noticed a sort of weird atmosphere has been settling over the country in the last week or so.

Everyone I’ve spoken to, my pals, my family, my girlfriend, I think everyone is starting to feel a bit strange, feeling their heads are a bit fried, as a result of how long this lockdown has lasted for.

We’re back in Glasgow now, having spent the last few months up in Dunblane at my girlfriend’s parent’s house. It was excellent and I think being up there out of the city made lockdown a lot easier for us all, especially just having access to a garden. Also having two dugs running about. But driving down Duke Street for the first time in a while last week was very odd.

Life felt almost normal up in Dunblane, every day just felt like a bank holiday. Everyone off work and out for walks, cycling, the smell of barbecues wafting through the air. But last week, seeing all the shuttered shops with big Covid-19 signs plastered over them, boarded up pubs, queues outside newsagents and cafés, it felt practically apocalyptic. Like the start of a film about the end of the world.

You could see people across the road from us, glum faces pressed up against their windows, staring out mournfully at the streets as they watched the rain.

I’ve been feeling it as well, unable to concentrate, spending my days just scrolling mindlessly through my phone while Netflix plays in the background, nothing it as to offer me can shake me from my boredom. That was until I came across Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Parts Unknown’ series.

Now I’m spending my days travelling the world, having dinner with the coolest man on the planet. He was, by some distance, the best celebrity chef not to mention an incredible journalist and author. ‘Where we gawn the day then, big man?’ I say, settling down onto the couch with a cup of tea and hitting play. ‘Borneo? Smashing.’ And away I go on a wee hour long holiday. Bourdain interviews all sorts of interesting people, eats whatever local delicacies get put in front of him and just generally cuts about looking suave.

There’s even an episode when he comes to Scotland and has dinner with national treasure Janey Godley.

She regales him with tales of growing up in Glasgow over dinner. I can’t help but wonder how it would have been a very different programme if somehow, inexplicably, I’d have been his Glasgow tour guide. Taking him round my favourite eateries and showing him what I get up to for fun.

‘Glasgow,’ he’d say in his voiceover. ‘A city divided in two, not by the river that cuts through it, separating the north and the south but instead, split right down the middle. East and West. I’ve enlisted the help of Glaswegian author, Chris McQueer, to show me round his home turf of the East End.’

The camera would cut to me, looking extremely nervous as I sit in my motor, waiting to pick up Mr Bourdain so we can go to Easterhouse shopping centre for a Greggs.

‘So what do you do for fun round here?’ he asks me.

‘Eh, well, when am no kidding on am writing I sometimes kid on am busy,’ I say. ‘I come here, get a Greggs an sit in the car park an eat an listen tae a podcast.’

He’s used to far more intellectual conversation, people with more diverse cultural interests. I am sweating, amazed that I’ve winged it through life so such an extent that I now have Anthony Bourdain sitting in the motor with me. He nods as I tell him our plan for the day, he seems genuinely interested. I think he thinks there’s must be a deeper meaning to all this. However, there is not.

‘So this is wit I get,’ I show him my steak bake, yumyum and a cup of tea. I suggest he gets the same.

‘So what’s in this steak bake? Is it… real steak?’

‘I hink it’s some kind ae meat, mate,’ I say with my mouth full of pastry. ‘Gravy anaw. It’s class, eh?’

He nods in contemplation. He feels this could be a metaphor for the class divide in the city or something. I offer no further comment.

Now I suggest we take the dug for a walk round Hogganfield loch. He muses about the loch itself, the way people flock to it, the history of the place. I tell him I once snuck here with my pals in the dead of night to have a drink.

He then watches me chase after the dug as he goes for a gaggle of geese.

He politely makes his excuses and leaves me to it. Instead, going to interview someone a bit more interesting. I think I’ll leave the cultural stuff to those more qualified than me. I’m glad in a way I’ll never get the chance to meet Anthony Bourdain, not because of the old adage about how you should never meet your heroes because you’ll only be left disappointed, but more so because I’d have simply embarrassed myself.