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Hi, you're listening to Podlittical BBC Scotland's podcast that brings you the biggest stories coming out of Hollywood and Westminster.

It's 1049 on Tuesday the 17th of

September. I'm David Wallace Locker, a political correspondent based in Hollywood and today is our first

interview episode of this run and joining us for it is the co-leader of the Scottish Greens Lorna Slater.

Lorna, thank you for coming

into our little cupboard in Holyrood. Good morning. I'm delighted to be here. Lorna, thank you for

joining us on the podcast. It's great to have you here. You are still within your first term at

Hollywood, but you'd be a familiar face to a lot of people who follow Scottish politics, not only

because you were in government until relatively

recently, we'll get to all of that. But let's start with how you got into politics and how you

got to Scotland, I suppose, because you're from Canada originally. That's true. So in 2000, I graduated

from the University of British Columbia with a master's degree in electromechanical engineering,

specialising in machine design. I think you'd probably call that a mechatronics degree here.

So you're not a career politician then, are you? You've got one of those real backgrounds we hear

about people like politicians to have. There you go. And I'd heard that you were short of

engineers in Britain, so I bought a one-way ticket.

And I worked in various different forms of automated machinery, robotic telescopes, machinery for the

biomedical industry. And then I moved up to Scotland, I think in 2003, to work in MEMs, which were

micro-electronic mechanical systems, in the sort of dying days of Silicon Glen.

I did that for about 10 years, and then in my mid-30s I had a bit of a, you know, one of those, not quite a mid-life crisis, a bit early for that,

...