I recently got the bad news that the old Glasgow Herald's man in Inverness and former owner of the Inverness Courier, Stuart Lindsay, has died. Stuart was very good to me and I learned a lot from him. Not that I realised at the time how much I was learning from watching him in action. He was a class act and a first rate journalist. Nor had I realised how much I was absorbing by osmosis earlier as an office boy on the Herald in Glasgow from watching the reporters in the main Glasgow office at work. A bunch of mainly first rate young folk had been recruited in the previous couple of years to replace the somewhat fusty newsroom. Then I got to thinking about how lucky I was to start my reporting career in Inverness. The town was the base for the Highlands and Islands reporters from all the main Scottish media outlets. How many weekly reporters get to compete on a daily basis against so many good operators? And learn so much from those very folk? Overall, I got a lucky start. And one of the biggest strokes of luck was knowing Stuart.