Nothing remains the same

This is a blip I have meant to do for a long time.

The building is in Holyrood Rd and I passed it this morning on my way to do live interviews in the BBC offices at the Tun for Good Morning Scotland and then the "Today" programme.

It was opened on St Andrews Day 1999 and was the new headquarters for the iconic "Scotsman" newspaper as well as the Edinburgh Evening News and Scotland on Sunday.

My mother was from Edinburgh so we used to take take the "Scotsman" every day at home when I was growing up even though we lived in Troon where the other Scottish national quality daily, the "Glasgow Herald" was the usual paper of choice.

I remember the old warren of a building on North Bridge where the "Scotsman" was put together and printed when I was at University and long before that. Later, when I was SNP Chief Executive, I used to have to go there to see successive editors.

The move to Holyrood Rd was immensely symbolic. The site was virtually next to where the new Parliament was being built and the building was open, airy and modern - the antithesis of what had gone before. The ribbon cutting was performed by the Queen and the event was the only occasion on which I met the then owners, the mysterious Barclay brothers. Later they tried to take over the Herald, with the aim of creating a single Scottish broadsheet , a intention I was pleased to play a small part in thwarting by means of strong Parliamentary opposition.

But all that heady ambition and optimism was not to last. The remorseless decline in newspaper readership affected the Scotsman like all the others . The constant cutting under editor after editor meant that there was much more space than was needed and higher overheads than could be borne,

Eventually the papers moved out and the place was taken over by Rockstar, one of the new computer games companies which were having huge success and which had started out in Dundee.

The Scotsman masthead - so familiar for so long - was removed as part of the extensive renovation and replaced by the logo that you can see in the picture. The formal name of the structure, Barclay House, was and is largely forgotten.

That change says so much about what has happened world wide and in our country over the past two decades.

An image can hold a whole history - cultural, economic, social and political - in its small space and this one does.