I look for the best in anything and I ignore the rest. I don't dwell on anything that's not very good

"I'd like to be able to give you a whole list of things that are not working well or how we're not keeping up to the mark," he tells me when I ask him for any below-the-mark examples, "but I certainly think Scotland is up there with everywhere else."

Yes, he admits, times are tough, and maybe a couple of the places he's seen are fraying at the edges (if you're a hotelier in Dundee I wouldn't rush out to get your copy. You may be disappointed), but compared to the country that he found back at the start of the 1990s when the first edition of the book appeared ... well, there is no comparison.

"What's on offer – food, service, variety, diversity, excellence – all of that has improved immeasurably. As it has everywhere. I firmly believe Scotland has improved better and faster than just about anywhere else in Britain."

Irvine is a promoter. In every sense of the word. As head of Unique Events it's his job to promote Edinburgh's Hogmanay and a variety of other arts-related events. And as author of Scotland The Best he's promoting all that's good and great about life north of the Border. More than that, though, he says it's just his default setting.

"I look for the best in anything and I ignore the rest. I certainly don't dwell on anything that's not very good. I never go to rubbish restaurants. Any duff meal is a wasted meal. If I go to the theatre and it's no good I'll leave at the interval."

We meet in Artisan Roast in Broughton Street ("possibly the best coffee in town" according to Scotland The Best), in what Irvine and possibly no-one else calls Edinburgh's East Village. He arrives wearing a tie and an unpressed shirt.

For all his natural ebullience his face, he admits himself, gravitates towards glumness. He won't tell me his age but given that he came to Edinburgh as a teenager in either the late 1960s or early 1970s (that's about as specific as he gets) we can speculate he's well into his fifties at least. He could pass as 10 years younger though.

He has yet to even see a copy of his book and when I lend him mine he's extremely reluctant to give it back. The 430 pages it contains are the result of not just six months' but the best part of 20 years' research. For this one, apart from the odd jaunt around Glasgow and Edinburgh, he didn't really do much before Easter. Because nowhere's open, he explains. But in February he started planning his round-Scotland trips and then after Easter he took to the road.

He stayed in hotels, visited restaurants, ate pub grub. Sounds great. Then again, he did it all on his own. He can't do it with anyone else around. He needs to be focused, he says. "I walk into a place and I take a mental picture. I might write two words to describe it – "broken lightshades" or "smell of coffee" – so when I'm writing the thing up I have to write it very quickly, within three days so I can recall the photograph. After three days it begins to fade and after a week it's gone and after a month it's totally deleted.

"That's why the whole thing is a completely-focused exercise to the exclusion of everything else. Some of the excursions are 10 days long and all the while I'm writing up."

It's an odd headspace, he accepts. And I point out that there's a curious contradiction. Here is a man who as a promoter and writer is celebrating all that's great about Scottish gregariousness and yet he spends most of his time alone.

"I think that is a valid observation. This is the ultimate loner trip thing and I'm never sure if I've chosen that or it's chosen me. When I'm doing it I can't go into any other conversations. It's a mental state where I suspend my sociability for that period.

"But I am a pretty sociable person. In the next month I've got three really big parties which I'm producing. One is our office party and all the people come back to mine after that. Then I always have a Christmas drinks party in this quarter and then I have the biggest party in Europe where we probably have 100,000 people at that. I like all that."

Well yes. But he also lives alone. "I do have people staying. But when I'm doing this," he says, picking up the book, "it's in the head but in a way it's in the house and all the notes and all the background are in the main living area of the house. It would be tricky if something was moved."

Irvine is, one journalist suggested, a sensualist with a Presbyterian work ethic. It's a description he recognises. "That's completely true. I am a total sensualist but I totally disparage people who don't seem to do anything. I do think there's a Scottish thing which is a work ethic. And there are good things that go along with it like probity and loyalty and integrity."

He almost sounds like Gordon Brown there. And in a way they share vaguely similar backgrounds. There's a Scottish provinciality in both. Irvine grew up in Jedburgh. "I lived an idyllic, always sunny childhood. I lived by a park and my memories are climbing trees and fishing for minnows in the river. It was a very safe world where you ran free. And of course you can't do that now. Not even in Jedburgh I imagine. It was safe ... although I was once chased by a guy who was thought to be a murderer."

Come again? Actually he's prone to these sudden revelations that offer a different vision to the one he's pedalling. Later, he's talking about his hippy days bumming round the world, hitchhiking across America ("four times") and the glory and freedom of the open road.

"I once arrived in South America with $10 in my pocket. I met two girls somewhere in Jamaica and I must have been stoned, I don't know, and they said we're going to South America and there's a really cheap flight you can get." And off he went. "I got travel in my blood and once it's in your blood it's always there. I still go to Asia about once a year. Now I'm staying in really good hotels."

He makes it all sound so wonderful. Did nothing go wrong in all those miles? "All the usual stuff when you're travelling. I was kidnapped. Practically raped. Abducted in Antwerp." In Antwerp? I was expecting you to say Ecuador, I say. "Lots of people get abducted in Antwerp. Yeah. Shot at on those thundering highways in redneck America. Shot at from trucks. You have to get on with it, don't you."

Well, yes, I suppose. And I guess it puts a damp hotel bedroom in Fort William into perspective.

Irvine first came to Edinburgh to go to university when he was 18. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming by his dad. "Of course it was the best thing he ever did for me." Now he loves the place. "I think the quality of life here is as good as it gets." After a short time as a supply teacher he started his promoting career in Stockbridge, opening Tiffany's on a Monday night in the late 1970s, "which was the gig in Scotland. There weren't any others. There was no music business. We sort of seized the time."

By the 1980s he'd opened up in Glasgow too, in Sauchiehall Street. "We did a lot of really interesting gigs there. We once did Chuck Berry and lost a fortune. You have to pay him up front. I suppose nowadays you'd call it enterprise. Then it was good fun. It wasn't a job. Teaching was the only job I did in my life. Everything else I've just made myself. I've been unemployable for a long time. But I've always made my own thing."

But for how much longer? If he is – by my speculation – on the verge of 60 can he imagine trekking around the country in another two years for another edition of Scotland The Best, never mind four years or six years? He doesn't know, he admits.

Starting this edition he did ask himself whether he could do it again. "Because it is a massive undertaking. It really is." And yet some eight months later he's sitting in an Edinburgh cafe (which, yes, now that you mention it, serves very good coffee) with another book in his hand. "Perhaps I should be thinking about ... not retiring, but gardening. None of that is very likely I'm afraid. I want to do new things."

Pete Irvine is an ageing neophiliac. That's not a contradiction. Or not any more of a contradiction than anything else about him.

Scotland The Best by Pete Irvine (Collins, £15.99) is out on Thursday.

pete irvine

LIFE AND LOVES

Career high:

Possibly the opening of the Scottish Parliament programme that we did. Opera, music, a huge parade, the Red Arrows, fabulous street theatre, the national gallery, fireworks. Low expectation, high result.

Career low:

Frank Sinatra at Ibrox Stadium, pictured, because of the ticket problems. The crowd went mental. The crowd coming in couldn't get the seats they thought they were getting.

Favourite meal:

Macaroni and cheese.

Favourite holiday location:

I love discovering new places. Last one I discovered that I really loved? St Barts. It's got the definitive fabulous beach.

Favourite film:

Crivens, that's a toughie for me. Last Year In Marienbad.

Favourite book:

I never read the same book twice. I never reread.

Best personality trait:

Curiosity.

Worst personality trait:

Impatience.