Politics is a family affair!

As an antidote to barely surviving the back to school shop, I ventured out for the very first time to the New Inn in Ellon to attend the SNP constituency Association Meeting. There was, I admit, a big pull to pop my CA cherry, Gillian was widely anticipated to secure a unanimous endorsement as the Aberdeenshire East candidate for the Holyrood election. And here she is after 100% achieving just that! She has worked, and will continue to work, extremely hard for this role.

So I attended, arriving late and sitting a bit awkwardly in a front row seat that others had deftly avoided, as it meant looking right into the steely gaze of yer actual Mr A Salmond, who I've found to be both great and unnerving in equal measure up close ( two good but contradictory traits for a politician, very hard to pull off, but he does).

But I soaked it all up, from the burgeoning audience of 100 plus supporters, to the old hands taking in the most recent faces, to the Chair's humour, to Gillian's down to earth speech, to the endorsement vote itself, to Alex Salmond's speech, to enthusiastically clapping hands and, of course, to the tentative but happy body language of a very proud Martin/ Taylor /Allardyce family.

Attending a political meeting to get over back to school shopping with the kids? What has become of me! What a difference a year makes, when Gillian was also the one that made me pop my cherry canvassing from the Quines for Indy stall in the centre of Aberdeen all last summer. And now she's the reason I've stepped over the CA threshold. What will 2016 bring?

Congratulations to Gillian and family.