I was born in Borneo and I used to fly to Malaysia to go to school. It was on an island called Penang and we did daily sport – football, rugby, British Bulldogs, aerobics, running every day so I was really active as a kid. When I was 11, my dad had a brain hemorrhage and so lost his job as a rubber planter and so me, my mum and my two brothers came back to Scotland.

When I was leaving my school in Penang, the headmaster, Mr Thurley, pulled me aside and said to me: “You’re the roughest child we’ve ever had at this school, you’ll play rugby for Scotland”. I remember thinking what a wonderful thing that would be.

Once we were back in Scotland, my granny paid our school fees and we went to Drumley House School in Ayrshire. It was a big rugby school and even at that age, I was pretty good. I was rougher than most of the boys although I wasn’t big at that point – I was skinny but I was naturally strong and I think that was as a result of all the activity I’d done as a little boy.

I then went to Glasgow Academy but when I was a school kid, rugby was not just a private school game. It was during my university years that I got selected to play rugby for Glasgow. My first game was against Lancashire and they had three British Lions in their team – Bill Beaumont, Fran Cotton and Tony Neary who played right opposite me. We were just a bunch of ordinary boys but we should have beaten them and I remember thinking that even the best players weren’t all that special and that I could make it.

Not long after that, I was picked to play for Glasgow against the All Blacks and I had to ask my university tutor for the afternoon off for the match. He just laughed at me because he thought I was joking. In quick succession, I was brought into the national team and then made a British Lions Tour. So one summer, I had been working as a scaffolder’s labourer while the next, I was on a Lions tour.

I was never a full-time athlete but I trained like an idiot leading up to my first Lions tour – I’d get the bus from Giffnock to Edinburgh to train with Cameron Sharp, Lynsey’s dad, as well of lots of extra sessions.

I think I handled things pretty badly around that time, to be honest. I enjoyed the journey getting to that point but once you hit the top, it’s very hard to stay there and for me, my Lions tours were not great. I made a big mistake on my first tour – I’d agreed to write a weekly column for The Herald but you weren’t allowed to do that when you were away on tour so after two of them, I got dragged into a room by the Lions management and I quickly found out that was my Lions tour over. I barely got a look-in after that.

A year later, there was a tour to New Zealand but the week before we were leaving, I got injured in training – my kneecap split and I had to have an operation. It got infected and I was even threatened with amputation because the drugs weren’t killing the bug but eventually, the drugs kicked in.

Later in my career, I got injured again before the first World Cup in ’87 and missed out on that. I was gutted but the BBC asked me to asked me to do a bit of commentary and that’s how I got into broadcasting. I’ve had some amazing experiences through that – I was in the stadium at London 2012 when Usain Bolt won 100m gold and I’ve been to multiple Commonwealth Games and Rugby World Cups.

I’ve also had the pleasure of watching two of my kids playing sport at the highest level with my son, Johnnie, playing rugby for Scotland and my daughter, Jenny, playing football for Scotland. I never liked commentating on rugby matches when Johnnie was playing though – I was very conscious that I didn’t want to be the over-enthusiastic dad. So I found that difficult, but you’re there to do a job to educate and inform people and I tried my best to do that.

I much prefer being a commentator to a pundit because as a pundit, I upset and annoyed people I really liked by saying some very silly things. I stopped being a pundit because I just don’t want to insult anybody. I still really love doing commentary though, although I don’t do it as much as I used to.

My background is engineering and mathematics and I look at sport like that, as a puzzle and I try and analyse it. I do that even when I watch Jenny, although she just rolls her eyes and thinks I’m an idiot because I didn’t play football. Actually, I get the rolling eyes from Johnnie too. Quite right.

My other daughter, Julie, didn’t do professional sport and she’s making a great job of getting through life too. The sporty kids have done well with their careers – not everyone can be the best in the world but you can be close to being the best and I think that, at times, both of them have been close to being the best and that’s been fantastic to watch.

John Beattie won 25 caps for Scotland and toured twice with the British Lions. He now presents the John Beattie Show on BBC Radio Scotland each weekday from 12-1:30pm.