A game-changing year for the city I’m proud to belong to

MOST weeks I can be found in front of a camera, walking round an auction property describing the damp, the mould or the period features I can see.

This week, my presenting task was a little different and involved a subject even closer to my heart than property: Dundee.

A few weeks ago, a lady called Sandra asked if I would like to front a short film for a big, new event — Dundee Fashion Week.

And on Monday I found myself saying some words to camera that brought home the huge change that has happened in Dundee — and more, the magnitude of transformation we are about to witness.

My script said that for Dundee, 2018 will be a game-changing year. In September, the only V&A design museum in the world outside London will open, in our city, the only one in the UK to be named a Unesco city of design.

Read that paragraph above and you could be talking about Paris or Rome, San Francisco maybe or Scotland’s capital Edinburgh.

But no, it’s us upon whom these precious gifts have been bestowed.

Often when I meet readers they say they like my positivity for Dundee. I am a bit of a cheerleader and love my role as a Dundee ambassador.

Blind positivity is, however, futile in any city and you just have to drive around to see problems with drugs, unemployment and poverty very much exist. Worse, there is a sense of detachment in such pockets of society from the jazzhands £1 billion Waterfront development that will transform lives as well as Dundee.

If the city should prosper from the V&A and surrounding projects, it must share some of this wealth in the parts tourists do not see. They may be hidden from visitors but not from the conscience of our council which must work for Dundee as a whole.

Back to being Mrs Positive Pants though. We are on a roll.

While there are people like Sandra Burke around — the lady (pictured) who asked me to present the short film she is organising to be shown at the Dundee Fashion Week finale in the Caird Hall on Sunday (tickets at £10 are still available) — things will continue to happen for Dundee.

With a charm and zest for life and her city, the PR guru has enlisted the likes of Iron Star Films to give their time freely to create something special for this inaugural event, the brain-child of Dundee and Angus College. In fact, the origins of our new fashion week go back to the college’s annual fashion show.

There will be a cast of hundreds who have helped pull the event together — and the number of events as well as the ambition of them is astonishing — and they are happening all over Dundee.

So what are you waiting for? Get involved. The commodity that will make this event a success is you.