Advertiser columnist Ruth Wishart met Judy Murray at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week...

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She ticked them off on elegant fingers. Four members of the Davis Cup team. Three world number one players - her own sons and Helensburgh's own Gordon Reid. A Davis Cup captain. All products of something Judy Murray set in motion as National Tennis Coach for Scotland – getting promising youngsters all over Scotland to play tennis with the help of proper coaches.

In fact you could add to that list several current top coaches (including Reid’s), who came through a period where this extraordinary woman used a modest salary and a slimline budget (which wouldn’t buy Wimbledon’s strawberries) to spread her passion for her sport in a country with lots of rain and a dearth of indoor practice options.

That drive and commitment shines through the pages of Knowing the Score, the story of the quite remarkable journey taken by Dunblane’s first family of tennis.

But so too do the many years of scrimping and saving, making do and mending to keep her sons, and Scotland’s sporting show, on the road.

This is a woman who recycled tennis balls for kids by sticking them in the tumble drier and then brushing them up individually!

She was one author I really wanted to chair at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, all the while hoping that she would be as nice as she seemed in her TV persona.

She is; warm and witty and totally down to earth. Not many people have the chutzpah to recall in front of a sell-out crowd that when she hired Davis Cup captain Leon Smith as a trendy, earrings-wearing 20 year old, her star struck pupils “thought he was the dog’s bollocks!”.

She was equally entertaining on the subject of her less-than-stellar career on the Strictly dance floor, remembering one epic rehearsal featuring a mock tennis match where partner Anton du Beke slipped and fell, headbutting her in the groin as he tumbled!

However there is one cloud still hovering over this normally sunny personality. It’s a year since the public inquiry into her proposals for a sports centre near her Stirlingshire home was concluded. And a year waiting for the Scottish Government to make a decision on whether or not it can go ahead.

You might think a grateful country would bite her hand off – not least since she’s already sunk a small fortune into the scheme - and implement plans which include not just indoor courts, but a six hole golf course for youngsters to get the kind of access they wouldn’t in most golf clubs.

Part of the funding for all this would come from 19 house units on the site, which seems to have much excrcised the local NIMBYs, despite the area currently being two large fields, near a motorway, in a part of Scotland hardly short of green belt recreational opportunities.

What makes her fearful is that with Andy and Jamie both now in their thirties, there’s not so much time left to surf the momentum of their success and build a decent sporting legacy for Scotland.

And, more than anything else, she wants that extraordinary success to spawn opportunities for the next generation. Hopefully one which doesn’t need their kit tumble dried for re-use.