THERE is much excitement in Dundee. You raise an eyebrow. “Dundonians are braw people, but not usually excitable. Whit’s afoot? Has Oor Wullie declared himself transgender?”

No, madam. They are excited because their new museum is about to open. It may sound odd on the face of it, but all hopes are pinned on the new V&A restoring the fortunes of the city, putting it on the world map, and bringing in bawbees by the bucketload.

It’s tempting to think that, back in Victorian times, the opening of Scotland’s massive original museums might have merited a mention under “News in brief”. Perhaps not. At any rate, Dundee’s new museum has the lieges in a tizzy, perhaps having imbibed the Victoria and Albert cocktails already devised by astute local hostelries.

The opening do on September 14 begins with a two-day festival headlined by Primal Scream, whose oeuvre includes If They Move, Kill ’Em and Swastika Eyes. How far we have come from a sedate quartet or brass band (actually, I have one Primal Scream album, though I can’t remember if it’s from their jangly or garage period).

Hotels are nearly full, and extra trains and buses to the city of jute, jam and junkets are being laid on, with 20,000 punters expected to party in a heritage hoedown. Talking of big numbers, the Scottish Government has pledged an additional £361,000 for the museum’s first year, the 1 presumably added to give the impression of proper costing and not just a round figure plucked from the ether.

The museum itself cost £80.1 million, making me think someone is definitely at it with the 1s. The £361,000 for 2018-19 is on top of £1m a year for the first decade and £5m towards “development costs”.

Campaigners are planning protests, saying the money would be better spent alleviating poverty, though the project has undoubtedly created jobs, with the council commendably forcing capitalists to pay the living wage.

Property prices have risen 5.9 per cent on last year to £142,231, and tourism in the year to April 2017 increased 10 per cent, though why they were coming so early is anybody’s guess. Perhaps they were on a themed tour of construction sites.

That said, the waterfront building is well worth a look. At first, remembering the determinedly international approach of the Scottish Parliament, folk feared the worst. “Let’s get somebody right foreign and fancy in, ken?” “Whit aboot that Kengo Kuma, ken?” “Sounds guid. A little alliteration an’ aw.” “Which part of Africa is he from?” “Japan.” “Aye, that’ll dae. Agreed?” “Agreed!”

But the choice of Kuma has proven to be astute. Unlike normal modern architecture, his building is imaginative, spectacular and aesthetically pleasing. If they’d hired a Scottish architect, they’d have got a glassy box loosely based on all the other glassy boxes.

Kuma’s V&A is a living building, casting shadows that change with the sun and seasons. With its curving, clinkered walls, it looks to me like a hulk ship but he mistakenly says it’s based on Scotland’s coastal cliffs.

So, what’s inside “Scotland’s first dedicated design museum”? Well, the first major exhibition has a maritime theme, in Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, celebrating great vessels from Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 1859 steamship, the Great Eastern, to the QE2 launched in 1969.

The V&A will also have Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s long-lost oak tearoom which last functioned in Glasgow’s Ingram Street in the early 1950s; a 15th century Book of Hours from France; a Jacobite garter from 1745-ish; and a gown designed on a Paisley pattern by Glaswegian Trisha Biggar for Natalie Portman to wear as Padmé Amidala when she went to yonder Naboo in Star Wars: Attack of the Clowns, if that was the name.

All in all, there’ll be around 300 exhibits including ceramics, furniture textiles, digital doo-dahs and twiddly bits of engineering. I was disappointed to read that there’ll be charges for the special exhibitions, as happens in Edinburgh’s big museums, and not surprised to read that a third of potential visitors in a Courier survey were unwilling to pay these.

Local Thatcherite Labour MSP Jenny Marra has also ominously warned that the V&A should “look at their own revenue generation streams” rather than rely on public grants. To hell with that. We’ve already paid through our taxes.

Oddly enough, museum bosses pooh-poohed a £10,000 donation from a local nightclub tycoon, not because it should have been £10,001 but because, while it was technically from upstanding social venue Fat Sam’s, the chap’s empire included Private Eyes, a lap dancing academy.

This was “contradictory to V&A Dundee’s core aims and values”. What they meant by this was that the V&A offers the most exciting time you can have – with your clothes on.