One of my London pals – an exiled Scot - rang me to say that my blog was making her homesick for Scotland.

'It must be very different from London' she said, with a wistful, Brigadoon-ish tone in her voice.

It is true that at this time of year it's light until almost midnight, (and for Dad, growing up near Wick, there really was such a thing as a midnight tennis tournament). We can see the hills from the top of our road, which is only a few miles from Glasgow City Centre and there is an unhurried, spacious feel about the place. It made me wonder what other differences I had noticed since I've been back.

For a start, and unlike when I was growing up in Scotland in the 60s and 70s, no-one any longer furrows their brow and says to me: 'We cannae unerston wit yoor sayin', whenever I open my mouth. There are many more 'softy Sassenachs' in Scotland these days and hearing an English accent is no longer a cue to embrace the other person as if greeting a fellow refugee.

The restaurants all have proper vegetarian options – sometimes more than one!  - and round here we have a choice of independent coffee shops. A far cry from the days of having to choose either the rather expensive and sophisticated (so we thought) Kardomah Coffee House in Buchanan Street  - or the unashamedly cheap and cheerful (or 'grotty' to use the language of the day) Wimpy Bar between the ABC 1 and the ABC 2 in Sauchiehall Street.

Drivers are more patient in Glasgow and tend to hoot more as a greeting than a threat – but they are quite slow, which is odd, given that I rarely see a speed camera and there's so little traffic on the roads. I guess the famously cavernous potholes might have something to do with it. Unless you have a four-wheel drive or similar, going too fast can be treacherous (inert sibling No 4, please take note).

You can park almost anywhere here, often without having to pay, or only pay very little. But because there's always plenty of space, drivers tend to leave huge gaps between cars, something not tolerated in London and dealt with by nudging cars closer together in a manoeuvre more usually seen on the dodgem track.

Explaining the misery of lime scale to a Glaswegian is a bit like telling a teenager about how we used to listen to music by putting a needle onto a piece of plastic.  They think we're just making it up!   It's a joy to wash and do washing here and the tap water is lovely to drink.  It's the same water that some bright spark is bottling and selling to the English!

It's true that the weather in Scotland is traditionally cooler than in the South.  But for the 10 months I've been back here there have been plenty of blue sky days.  I've worn my sunglasses more often than my thermals; we had no snow here to speak of, (although it seems I was the only person who felt cheated by the lack of snow), and it has rained far less than I expected.

I'm delighted to be back in the home of Empire Biscuits – they are largely responsible for my having a sweet tooth. For some reason you can't get Empire Biscuits in England, and in Northern Ireland they're called 'German' Biscuits. No idea why!

I've also reignited my passion for Tunnock's Caramel Wafers and have been trying to find an excuse to visit the Tunnock family's bakery and adjacent cafe just up the road in Uddingston.  Their legendary biscuit wrappers claim that five million are made and sold world-wide every week.  So clearly that's not just the population of Scotland or even the UK.  They are a world wide treat.

For me, the real difference between Glasgow now and the Glasgow of my teenage years – apart from the fact that the Caramel Wafers seem to go straight to my hips and stay there these days, there's no dancing them off - is the conversation.  Where once it was all about boys, make-up, music and the future, now the preoccupation is with trying to remember things, dwindling savings, poor eyesight, and the past.

But for most people living here – whether locals or incomers, Glasgow is a place of vibrant activity, with over 70 choirs of one sort or another and a festival every month of the year: The West End Festival, the Southside Fringe, Celtic Connections, the International Jazz Festival, Merchant City Festival, the Aye Write Literary Festival, and so on. Glasgow has hosted both a Garden Festival and been European City of Culture (either of which would have been unthinkable in my youth).

Much of what I'm enjoying will change as more people move to Scotland in search of wide, tree lined streets and guaranteed parking.  My little corner of west London was like that when I first moved there in the 80s, but it's so popular now that there's nowhere to park and the trees are being removed from the streets to better enable people to pave over their front gardens to create off-street parking.

At the moment the whole of Scotland has the same number of people living in it as live in London.  But I don't think that can last. At the weekend one of the UK's up-market national newspapers had a colour supplement feature on Tunnock's! Add a Tea Cake styled theme park to those leafy boulevards and I think there would be no stopping the hordes.

Scots beware! You may soon find yourselves outnumbered.