He has a point. Um - is it photography in Bradford this year? Was it literature in Swansea last year? Can't quite seem to remember, though the earlier Year of Visual Arts in the North-East managed to make an impact outside its immediate area, and paved the way for Anthony Gormley's titanic sculpture, the Angel of the North. Isaacs is, of course, partisan and proud of it. He hails from the city and is on the Glasgow '99 board. He likes the idea of "Clyde-built", claims that his birthplace will "grip the imagination of the world" in the last year of the century, and best of all, will leave a permanent residue. Another board member, Wally Olins, is equally upbeat, talks of "huge design energy", and urges everyone to visit Glasgow next year to see the marvels that will take place. Fine words. But do they ring true?

Certainly Isaacs and Olins are, as public speakers, infinitely better salesfolk for the Year, as I'll call it, than Deyan Sudjic, its director. Sudjic's reticent nature and soft-spoken delivery have at times seemed at odds with the up-front company he has kept over the past few years. Indeed, various sections of Glasgow's design community have been by turns puzzled and infuriated as they try to work out what Sudjic is up to, and whether he is quite so silently manipulative as he sometimes appears to be. The boy can't help it - for all his charm and diffidence, he was born to appear Machiavellian, whether that image is real or imagined. But he has got on with the job and delivered most of the goods. Looking at Glasgow today, you wish he had had the power and the money to do much more.

In Glasgow, they love a good conspiracy. It is a city in cultural ferment, where the director of the city's museums and galleries, Julian Spalding, recently resigned in protest against the reorganisation of his fiefdom. Where the Lord Provost, Pat Lally, a champion of the Year, found himself under investigation by his own party - but bounced back. Where the acerbic architecture critic Gavin Stamp (Private Eye's "Piloti"), based in Charles Rennie Mackintosh's School of Art, at first declared that if Sudjic came to Glasgow, he, Stamp, would have to leave. In fact the two established a truce, and Stamp will curate the Glasgow 99 exhibition on one of the city's other great architects, Alexander "Greek" Thomson.

Alexander "Greek" Thomson church