FUNNY how you can be blind to what you see every day.

Occasionally circumstance takes me back to Coatbridge where a stride along the main street sinks the heart. I remember going “up the street” with my gran when I was little. It was exciting. It was a French Fancy from the bakery and a choice of shops to browse. The bakery remains but, partly because I’m only there every so often, the greyness of the place each time strikes me.

My new local high street, on Glasgow’s south side, is a mix of charity, betting and e-cigarette shops. Despite some creative and interesting new start-ups, there are gaps along the main street like the grimace of a Halloween pumpkin.

I walk or cycle through Glasgow city centre on a daily basis but it wasn’t until last summer when I took two visiting friends from Sweden for a walk down Sauchiehall Street and along Argyle Street that I really saw how dismally frequent are the number of empty retail units.

A PwC survey has found more shops closed in Scotland than in any other part of Britain last year. Across Scotland the closures work out at one per day with 366 stores shutting and 254 opening in the last year and this isn’t unusual: the average of around one closure per day has been the Scottish average for most years since 2012.

Fast-food outlets and tobacconists were those bucking the trend, both among the most prolific new openings. A burger and a fag. What a proud cliché.

Our high streets were once social hubs where your name was known in the butcher’s, the baker’s and the fishmonger’s. Retail therapy was a respectable pastime. They were a cohesive centre for communities.

Now they’re for coffee and gambling. Even in the most boarded up of main streets there’s a Costa and a Ladbrokes.

Everything’s against the high street: the general market desire for cheap labour, insecure employment and profit. Out of town retail parks where parking is free and straightforward and the big name brands are comfortingly, repetitively, predictable. Banks are closing down - RBS and Clydesdale Bank are shutting branches while Airdrie Savings Bank has shut for good. The internet - blamed for a smorgasbord of societal ills - must also take its share of the blame with its cheap home deliveries. High business rates and planning strictures.

The shopping experience has become automated: we pack our own bags and take our own change. Town centres need people who have disposable income and disposable time. Those who have one or both are few and far between.

There’s nothing surprising here. We know what’s killing the high street - the question is, should we attempt to revive it? We should, but we need to look at new solutions.

A shared space is vital for a citizenry. Online shopping and telephone banking rob us of the opportunistic interactions that create communities. It’s too much to expect high street shops to compete with the likes of Amazon or Braehead shopping mall.

So it’s time to be more creative with our town centres. Back to my local high street, in Govanhill, where Milk Cafe is a social enterprise giving asylum seeking women the chance to develop the skills they need for integration and employment. It uses the draw of coffee and food to create, unlike an ubiquitous chain, tangible community benefits. This is the kind of creative alternative that could foster a new kind of community centre.

We need to fill our high streets with new life and innovative ideas, socialising, living and learning where we once simply shopped.