SOMETIMES, WHEN the weather is humid, the city is grey in tones as if painted in oil colours. Looking from the window, with a whisky in my hand, I can only think of this beautiful country.

Some friends find in that habit the traces of a traditional thinker in my personality.

But they don't understand that I see the future.

For me Scotland is a bridge between the past of romantic heroism and a future of hope and strength.

Of proud origins we face now a great future. As I see, we had come a long way.

Long gone are the times of clandestine distillation, now whisky is made with knowledge and skills that had become art; and the nation's tartan is waved with fibre-optic.

From echoes of battles past, to the sounds of new greatness in technology, arts and politics.

When I see Scotland I see the modernism born from traition: our museums keeping the old heritage but explained with interactive monitors, factories producing with avant-garde technology and guarding the environment.

We are the product of a moment in the history of time that keeps updating and reinventing itself constantly. Each face you see in the street is like a scream saying: "here goes the future of this nation!"

Modernism will come with technology, good use of our resources, design, arts, architecture but also the people: We have thousands of visitors each year, and each time someone looks with awe at our country's marvels: they sigh and that sigh stays in the air: a vibration, an energy suspended in the ether. Over the years that force has accumulated from the marvelled spirits of millions of stunned souls, and that's the liveliness we feel in the air of Scotland.

But our journey had done nothing else but just start I would love to see, 10 generations in the future, how will they see through the window in a damp Scottish afternoon?

What would they think?

How will they drink their whisky?