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Most importantly I will spend time with my family. I’ve missed out on a lot of the kids’ lives already. That’s because of the sheer amount of work you need to put into talking, which is essentially how I’ve made my living until now.

All this might sound like a mid-life crisis, but it does not come out of nowhere. My wife is a Canadian citizen, and we’d always discussed moving abroad some day. To be frank I never had the guts to walk away from the money until I stopped enjoying what I do. We sold our house in Glasgow at the beginning of the year and my wife had some savings after assorted family bequests which gave us an opportunity to choose our future.

It is a good time for our children too. My eldest is 10 this week: just young enough to go to a different culture without getting bullied too much. My other two kids know that they can watch Peppa Pig and SpongeBob Squarepants all over the world now, so they wouldn’t care if we were moving to Baghdad.

We looked at Canadian property online back in July, starting in Toronto, where my mother-in-law lives. Then one of us remembered hearing that Nova Scotia was “nice”. We can’t remember where or from whom: It truly was as vague and inconsequential as that. So we directed the web-browser to Nova Scotia. It’s beautiful! And cheap as chips! Actually given the way food prices have shot through the roof, that’s not far off the truth.

As a comparison: 500 square metres in Elgin, Scotland, without a house costs you £120,000. Four acres of coastland in the nicest bit of Nova Scotia costs you half that. A five-bedroom house with nine acres of land in the country outside Glasgow or Edinburgh will set you back £800,000. Our version of that house in Nova Scotia cost half again.

So I quit my job at Talk107, got flights for all the family, set up 20 properties to look at and went over there for three weeks. Which became four weeks because I tried to save money by flying with Zoom airlines. More on that later . . .

We came. We saw. We bought. In the space of 19 days. Every day I spent there felt like I’d come up for air after being underwater for the last 10 years. It’s an hour by plane to Boston but 12 hours to drive there — that’s exactly what I had to do to get back home when Zoom airlines went bust. With seven members of my family in tow and £4,500 more than I planned disappearing out of my bank account as a result. Still, we saw most of Nova Scotia as we drove right across it to get to America and the more we saw, the more we knew we’d made the correct decision.

There are mountains, beaches and lobsters aplenty. As far as industry goes there’s fishing and mining of salt, and gypsum (used to make plaster). But most is unspoilt. The first settlers were the Mi’kmaq indians, then some French came over in 1604, then some Scots in 1620, who had all gone by 1624. (They were supposed to have gone by 1621 but they also booked their travel with Zoom). English loyalists and black slaves came over after the American war of independence, then in the late 19th century Irish and Scots arrived, following their assorted famines and clearances.

When I told someone at Celtic Park about my move, he said, “Aw man, you’ll be part of the diaspora!” I was most impressed. Nobody has ever used the word “diaspora” in conversation with me. Ever. But part of it I will become in a few months.

I’ll miss the football. I will also miss the Glasgow music scene, the Edinburgh restaurants, the Arbroath cliffs and the Arrochar Alps. But at least I can still listen to Watson’s Wind Up online.

There are far more things I won’t miss. The weather, predictably. The bigotry, the religious extremists, the latent aggression that underpins everything in this country now — knowing you’re only ever a heartbeat away from a snarl or a smack; wondering whether the guy you’ve just overtaken on the road has a knife.

My wife is going home, but she wonders how I will settle. “Won’t you be bored?” she asks. She knows I have form for this. In December 1999 we moved from London to the Lake District. I wanted to bring my first child up outside London, partly because I had just told the bosses of 5 Live and BBC3 where to shove their stations. I was also convinced that the millennium bug was going to wreak death and destruction on the world. Who says cocaine makes you ill-tempered and paranoid?

After about a month, when I realised that the world had in fact carried on and I was stuck with 140 tins of pineapple rings and spaghetti hoops in the cupboard, I hated living there. I doubled the amount of cocaine and became severely depressed.

I’m a different person now. I haven’t taken a drug that’s remotely interesting for three years. I’m drinking a quarter what I used to. I’m exercising and going to mass/therapy regularly — the two are, in effect, the same thing — one just contains more Latin bits than the other.

At the risk of sounding a bit too “cardigan”, I feel more spiritual now. I can sit, as I did for so much of my time out in Nova Scotia, watching the sea or some trees for an hour without feeling the urge to get up and play Super Mario Kart. I think that’s a fairly decent definition of spirituality in 2008.

I now want different things for myself and my family. In a couple of months I’ll discover if they’re in new Scotland rather than the old one.

I’ve got enough money to support us for a year. After that — who knows? If you visit Nova Scotia in 12 months’ time I might be asking you if you want fries with that mooseburger. But I’ll have given it a go.

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