THE sun is shining on George Square, and inside the Lord Provost's office, which overlooks the Square, the mood is just as warm.

Bob Winter, 70, has not long arrived at the City Chambers in his official car, GO 1.

"I would be lost without it ... it is one of the biggest privileges of the job," he says. "I can sit in the back, catch up with paperwork, even take phone calls from the office."

I turned on the TV and saw Frankie Vaughan at my desk talking about Easterhouse IT was the summer of 1968, Glasgow Fair Friday, and Bob Winter, a young Easterhouse social worker, could not wait to set off on his fortnight's break in Wales. Just then a local minister, part of a local action group Mr Winter had set up, said he was planning to invite singer Frankie Vaughan up to help combat gang warfare in the area. "I told him, It's a good idea, but let's bring it to the group and we'll discuss it'," said Mr Winter. "But he said No, I'm just letting you know what I'm going to do'." Bob shrugged, and went off on holiday. A week later, he turned on the television and was startled to see Vaughan, one of Britain's top stars, "sitting in my office, at my desk, talking about what he hoped to do for the youth of Easterhouse." Vaughan's arrival made international headlines at a fascinating time for Easterhouse. Rangers, Celtic, the army and the then Chief Constable, Sir James Robertson, all got involved at one time or another. Vaughan's intervention - getting local gangs, including the Drummie and the Toi, to lay down their arms, and raising funds for the Easterhouse Project - proved controversial at the time. But within a few months the police were reporting a decline in gang activity in Easterhouse - and the singer was even invited to Chicago to tell experts there how he had done it. Recalls Mr Winter: "What Frankie did was to highlight the lack of resources as a real issue. Although it put a lot of noses out of joint, probably because it happened too quickly without taking enough people with it, it did lead to some practical services being put into place."

He works around 100 hours every week but - and let's be plain about this - Bob Winter is a man who loves his job.

"It's a tone-setting position," he says. "It's a task you take on and perform for three or four years.

"There are certain civic duties you must do, and you try at all times to be a good representative of the city.

You try to give visitors a good image of the place.

"I am aware of that all the time. What I am really here to do is promote Glasgow to the best of my ability.

"At the end of the day, I see it as a job, a very privileged one.

It is not like Royalty - that is what they do for life, their job is who they are. I have this job for four years."

The Lord Provost's chair has been occupied by some high-profile characters in the last 30 years: Pat Lally, Michael Kelly, Liz Cameron, Alex Mosson, Peter McCann.

Are they a hard act to follow?

With no hesitation, Bob replies: "As a citizen of Glasgow you got a strong sense of the citizenship of the place, and you knew all the Lord Provosts.

"I realised what was invested in the role, and it gives me a feeling of humility, of pleasure, and an awareness of the major contribution that some of my predecessors have made.

"It also gave me determination to try to do something, to leave something behind, so people could say Bob Winter was Lord Provost for four years, and he did this and he did that ... "

He is, needless to say, working on an agenda, more of which later.

Mr Winter, who took over a year ago in May, is, at first glance, quieter and more unassuming than some recent predecessors - but it is worth scratching a little deeper.

A while back, for example, he startled his hosts in Russia's Rostov-on-Don, one of Glasgow's twin cities, with his skills with the machine gun and air gun at a target range. They were not to know he had acquired those skills many years ago, in his National Service days.

He has been granted the Freedom of the City of London, an honorary title that gives him the right to marry in St Paul's Cathedral - and to be drunk and disorderly without fear of arrest ("always handy to know," he quips, drily).

He is passionate about walking - "sounds desperately boring, doesn't it?" - and football (Celtic, it emerges). He also likes golf, although he describes his talents as "diabolical".

In his time as Lord Provost he has continued the Malawi work set in motion by Liz Cameron. Just the other week, Glasgow and the Scottish Parliament jointly sent £10,000 in emergency aid to residents of a flood-hit part of that unlucky but beautiful country.

Bob was born in Bonawe Street, Queen's Cross, in 1937. His father died when he was six.

It was a typical Glasgow tenement childhood: "Trying to catch the mice in the morning, and killing off the slugs with salt and throwing them on the fire.

"We had the usual things - the outside toilets that didn't always work, the middens and the wash-houses, a wee gas ring to cook on, and the weekly bath at Maryhill Baths."

He had never heard of Allan Glen's School, a top city establishment, until one of his teachers at Dunard Street Primary suggested he sit a bursary exam for it.

"I was bright enough at primary, but all that happened, really, was the teacher put me in for Allan Glen's, where I got five years' good education, mixing with people from different backgrounds and playing things like rugby, which I would never otherwise have played."

It also bracketed him as one of the school's old boys, alongside actor Dirk Bogarde, songwriter B A Robertson and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Not for Bob Winter the lure of acting or songwriting, though. There was only one direction for him. "Politics," he declares. "I had been active since I was 14."

He joined Glasgow Corporation.

"It offered tremendous opportunities. You could choose any career you wanted - law, architecture - but I wanted to be a social worker, which seemed odd to them at the time.

"Although I ultimately wanted to be a politician, I wanted to work with people and help them and make society better. I suppose that was what drove me."

He spent his entire career in social work, rising to become Strathclyde Region's last social work director before reorganisation in 1995, and then retiring.

His retirement lasted three years before he waded back into local government, this time as a councillor, in 1999.

Bob and his second wife, Sheena, have a daughter, Sara, 23, who has just qualified in medicine.

He first wed when he was 21 and has four children from that marriage - Alan, 48; Mark, 45; Gary, 43; and Craig, 40. All are doctors, teachers or social workers.

Bob is keen to talk about the work of the Lord Provost's office.

"This is a wonderful time to be Lord Provost. It is sometimes hard to appreciate what is happening all around you, but I am convinced this will come to be seen as Glasgow's renaissance period.

"We have renewed ourselves in the past, but this time there is a vigour, a depth to the changes, that will be looked back on in the same way we now look back on the Industrial Revolution.

"But we also know the city has significant social problems. There is little chance now of many people leaving school without social skills and still getting a job in one of the heavy industries.

"We now live in a service economy, which places different requirements on different kinds of skills. That has been a big shift."

Talking about your legacy can sometimes tempt fate, but what does he want his to be?

"I would like to be seen as someone who contributed in a significant way to strengthening civic pride in Glasgow and strengthening the communities here," he says.

"I want to do something that will make people say I live in a good neighbourhood, I live in a great city and I take pride in it'. I would like to leave that mark on the city."

He aims to start a scheme to reward Glaswegians who make a positive contribution to city life.

"There are people, for example, who run football teams for kids, or lunch clubs for old people, or look after disabled people. There are thousands of such people.

"What they do needs to be held in high esteem in their community. I want them to get recognition at a local level - by awards of some kind, by rewards, which can come from a range of sources.

"I want to get all the public and private agencies behind this so we can support what is being done and encourage more of the same.

"We really want to get behind people in their own areas."