Novelist, broadcaster, failed clown and sometime stand-up Alison Kennedy grew up an Anglo-Scot in Dundee - or "the city Scotland loves to mock", as she put it in the first of five very personal (and often very funny) takes on Scotland and Scottishness for The Essay: Homage To Caledonia (Radio 3, daily, 10.45pm).
The station's late-night strand suits Kennedy's spiky and thought-provoking broadcasts and, since leaving Glasgow for London, a move she recounted here, she's found as much favour among the radio taste-makers of the south as she ever did among their Caledonian counterparts in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Monday's topic was the kilt. Naturally there was mention of the Bay City Rollers, football and the Tartan Army, and a nod to the kilt's reinvention in the Noughties as a token of Cool Caledonia. There was also talk of the Kennedy tartan, a "puce and acid yellow" confection, though the mini version Kennedy (pictured) wore as a girl was in a more sober red. Later, as a bolshy anarchist-cum-drama student, she took to wearing tartan trews.
"I looked like a slightly punk migraine, a bewildered cliche living on pre-emptive nostalgia and an incomplete understanding of Red Clydeside," she said.
On Tuesday it was Scotland's humour that went under Kennedy's McMicroscope as she tried to find out what the "G" in GSOH might stand for if Scotland was a person advertising in the Lonely Hearts column. It's not often I laugh out loud at Radio 3, but Kennedy had me going during this one.
Wednesday and Thursday tackled national stereotypes and accents. Kennedy, growing up in "a middle-class, vocally homogenised bubble" in Dundee's university quarter, inherited a BBC accent which became a sort of handicap from which writing seemed like an escape. Friday looked at identities, both national and city, and at the stories we Scots use to create and sustain those identities. Again Dundee came into the tale.
Fewer belly laughs here, then, but more joined-up thinking and more rich and learned philosophising.
If Kennedy's wit made me forget which station I was tuned to, her name-checking of Brazilian author Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro and of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who invented the term "genocide", soon brought me back to reality.
Not quite the Reith Lectures, then, but as skilful a dissection of our national psyche as I've ever heard.
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