CAUGHT in a cloudburst, I arrive at the door of Jackie Kay’s parents’ house in Bishopbriggs, looking like a deep sea diver who forgot his wetsuit. Shivering, I am ushered into their inviting, memento-filled house so warmly I might be one of the refugees Kay writes of in her newest poem Threshold: “And keep the door wide open, not just ajar, And say, in any language you please, welcome, welcome, To the world’s refugees.”

While the Makar finds me a towel, her father John makes a cup of tea and brings a hairdryer. It blows the rain not just from my hair but my trousers, and there’s no need to put on the jogging pants our national poet thoughtfully offers. Throughout the kerfuffle, her mother Helen looks on with amusement, and speaks impishly of rubbing shoulders with “Liz and Phil” the previous weekend at the opening of the fifth Scottish Parliament's new session in Holyrood, where her daughter read Threshold, her inaugural poem as Makar, with no sign that her knees were knocking.

Settled at last by a window overlooking a well-tended garden in the house where she and her older brother Maxwell were brought up by their adoptive, communist parents, 54-year-old Kay talks about her new role with typical ebullience, and her winning combination of confidence and humility. “I like the idea of me being Makar, but it’s not just about me being Makar,” she says in her sing-song Glasgow accent which years of living in Manchester have not changed. “I kind of think of it as a Makarship. I like the idea of getting people on board the Makarship, and on that Makarship we’ll be going on different voyages of discovery, and across the water to different islands.”

She means this quite literally, with her first events taking her to Lewis, Iona, Harris, Shetland and Orkney, as well as Rannoch Moor, places she feels are often ignored.

As Makar, Kay is expected to write two poems a year, and do six events, “but I will do six expected events and six unexpected ones," she says. "I like the idea of every event having a mirror, a partner. So if you were doing an event in an arts venue, you might also appear in an old people’s home nearby.”

High among her priorities is a project in which she would like everybody, not just poets, to write a poem called My Scotland, which would be posted online. “They could write it in any language – it could be Polish, Doric, Gaelic, Glaswegian – and then we’d get a sense of the multi-voiced and multi-facedness of Scotland. Because I think the image of Scotland is still set about 50 years ago, and it hasn’t been updated. People outside of Scotland still think of a Scottish person as being ‘like this’, in a way that they don’t about an English person. If when I’d finished being Makar the idea of that had changed a bit, that would please me enormously.”

Although her remit is not overtly political, since the post of Makar is in the gift of the Scottish Government, how would she feel about tackling subjects that were critical of it?

“I wouldn’t have agreed to be Makar if I could only speak about certain things, or only in a chiming voice. Yes,” she continues, unable to repress a lyrical stream of thought, “we poets we rhyme and we chime, but we don’t chime in that kind of way. I never think of the role as being obsequious in any way, and I don’t think they would want me to be either. On the other hand, I am very aware everybody wants your opinion. I don’t want to be rent-a-quote, I don’t want to become a political pundit.”

It was an occupational hazard her predecessor Liz Lochhead at times found irksome and Kay is wise to be wary of it, not least because she does not want to alienate her constituency. “I am the Makar of the whole country. I’d like everybody to feel they can come aboard the Makarship, that you didn’t have to have a party card.”

The only downside to this post is her sudden fame, her face on TV and in the papers. “I don’t particularly like that bit of it,” she confesses. “Everybody values privacy. But there’s some little line and once you cross over it, you can suddenly feel over-exposed or a bit agitated. It’s as if, if you were going to make a mistake or you were going to trip up there’d be this full glare on you, like burglar lights.”

Despite the fanfare which greets the Makar’s appointment, don’t most people live most of their lives without giving poetry a thought? Kay shakes her head. “I think people live with poetry at different times in their lives, at heightened moments. They’ll often turn to a poem when they’re recently bereaved, or when they’re planning a wedding or making a speech. For people to have access to poetry outside of those times is very important. Poetry is the language of being human. It can often give a voice to very, very complicated things. Whether you’re writing about nationhood or country or belonging, or hurt or bereavement or grief or love, there’ll be a poem about that by poets living and dead across time.”

There is, she adds, “a great tradition of Scottish poets going back and back, Burns, Fergusson, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean, Norman MacCaig, they all had a way of taking on board the issues of their time and at the same time the tiny creatures and the rivers and the smaller things.”

Later, when I’m leaving, she shows me a small photo on the wall of a young Kay, aged about 20, sitting in a row with Norman MacCaig, Sorley Maclean and Edwin Morgan. You might say it was a glimpse of her future status, yet there is nothing arrogant about her. Quite the opposite. Most people, she says, responded to her appointment with an enthusiasm that surprised and touched her. “But there’s always going to be a few other poets who will be jealous or less than generous. ‘Five years is a long time to trip up,’ I’ve been told. ‘Let’s just wait and see how you trip up.’”

The world of poetry, she acknowledges, can be snobbish too, but she refuses to let it upset her. “Because I wouldn’t pretend I have a huge talent. I think I’ve got a wee bit of talent, but it’s enough to try and do the things I want to do, but you can always get better.”

Twenty years ago, when Kay was sitting at home in Manchester with her then partner Carol Ann Duffy, now Poet Laureate, did they ever imagine they would each one day hold such prestigious posts? She laughs and laughs. “Like it was a masterplan? Not in a million years!”

Nor does she think that the post of Makar threatens or diminishes that of the Poet Laureate. “I don’t think [Carol Ann] would see it like that, because there’s a national poet for Wales, and a national poet for Scotland. What there isn’t is a national poet for England. If there was an Irish one, it would be for Ireland, so it would make the Poet Laureate of the UK an overarching role. But that there isn’t an English national poet is something to think about.”

Some time before she became Makar, on one of Kay’s frequent trips with her eighty-something parents, they were in a tearoom. One of her poems was hung on the wall. “Look at that,” said her father. “Carol Ann is the Poet Laureate, and you’re the Poet Laminate.”

Her partner of many years now is Denise Else, a sound technician, and it says much about all parties that Kay and Duffy remain great friends. She thinks her ex is “the best Poet Laureate we’ve ever had”, and when we speak, she has just finished a gruelling 14-day road trip in her company, along with the Welsh national poet Gillian Clarke, poet Imtiaz Dharker, and various supporting staff.

In Red Dust Road, her throat-catching memoir of searching for her birth parents, Kay mocks herself and others. “It’s funny how we poets call readings gigs, really sad and pathetic, just to pretend we are pop stars. We meet each other on the road and say, ‘Done any good gigs recently?’ ‘Yes, Milton Keynes Central Library.’” Yet in this two-week slog across Britain, supported by independent bookshops from Falmouth to Bath, Caernarfon, Carlisle and Corbridge, to Biggar and St Andrews, so big were the audiences they had to speak in village and church halls. It might not be rock’n'roll but this fabulous four is as close as the literary world has got in recent times.

As witnesses to the seismic shifts in the country following the Brexit vote, their timing could not have been better. In the same way that Threshold acquired a prescience not intended when Kay wrote it, so, she says, another poem took on a different meaning in the space of a few days. For obvious reasons, it is informally called Planet Farage, despite its proper title, Extinction: “We closed the borders, folks, we nailed it. No trees, no plants, no immigrants ... No Greens, no Brussels, no vegetarians, no lesbians ... No emus, no EUs, no eco warriors, no Euros ...We shut it down!”

“When I first started reading that on this tour,” she says, “people were in stitches, it was hilarious. Then, once the referendum happened, people were like in stunned, shocked silence. They’d pause for ages and ages, and then would burst into applause. The poem was the same poem but it had changed because of what had happened politically.”

Unlike many Remain voters, Kay was not surprised when the Leave campaign won. “We’d been travelling about picking up the temperature, and that’s what started to make me worry. Everywhere we went we asked people how they were going to vote, and everywhere we went people were saying out, out, out. Every taxi driver, everybody that was serving us in a canteen, every market stall.”

Her eyes shine as she recalls that trip: “When we crossed the Border [to Scotland] in that minibus, we all cheered, we all broke out into applause, and we were all visibly moved. Some of us were in tears. We just felt very, very, very grateful.”

All sign of humour has gone when she contemplates what has happened. “It was so irresponsible to have that referendum, and to have unscrewed the top of something that was very tightly on. And there’s a huge amount of stuff flying out, poison, a poisonous air. You could actually pick up the air of change. I found that really shocking.”

And already Brexit has had an impact on her. “I hope that mirror we’re seeing at the moment, the increase in racist attacks across the country, is not truly reflective of the broader population, but for the first time in my adult life I don’t feel safe in the same way.

“You cross the road and you think, is that person a Brexiteer and are they going to reverse into me? We all felt a bit like that on the minibus. A lot of my black friends feel like that, going from a position of confidence and ease to suddenly feeling under pressure. I feel so bad being a mum, thinking my boy is coming up in this world.” Her boy is son Matthew, 27, who had tried to reassure her the night before the vote that everything would be fine.

As Threshold suggests, Kay thinks we can lead by example. “The population is very different here in Scotland. I think we have a moral obligation to welcome people who have been through terrible things... Our ancestors who took in people in the Second World War would be ashamed of us. Our grandfathers, our great grandfathers who fought in the First World War would not have fought for this. Ours is a truly shaming time to be living through. It makes you feel ashamed to be part of the UK, but proud to be Scottish. And that’s very difficult to get your head around.”

So would she leave Manchester and return here? “I’m really seriously going to be considering living back in Scotland. So many friends of mine are, because we feel so troubled and distressed by what has happened. The climate, the tone and the timbre of many parts of England have changed. Not Manchester itself,” she quickly adds, “because Manchester voted Remain, and I’ll still be Chancellor of Salford University. But I might make my base here and commute there, rather than the other way around.”

Kay was brought up in a Labour heartland, the child of a Communist Party organiser, and a schoolteacher who, as the daughter of a Lochgelly miner, was as red as her husband. What does she think of the astonishing vanishing act of the Labour Party?

“I feel it’s really awful timing, the Labour Party’s meltdown. But I feel we’re living in a country that’s having a nervous breakdown. Or even worse, a country where it’s Home Alone. Anybody in? Nobody’s here, sorry! The television’s blaring, you can tell there’s been people here quite recently, there’s bowls on the table. It’s like some fairytale gone badly wrong. There’s Boris Johnson-sized bowls, and a wee bowl of Corbyn’s porridge ...”

At the other end of the room, Kay’s parents sit and chat. Her brother will be arriving soon with his son, and when he does, John Kay commandeers his car and gives me a lift back to the station. Before I prepare to leave, however, Kay reflects with astonishment on the changes that have occurred in her homeland in her lifetime.

“I once left Scotland years ago because I didn’t feel it was an open enough society, and because it felt difficult to be openly gay, and it didn’t feel easy being a black person in Scotland either. Now [after the vote] I felt like I couldn’t wait to get back over the border to where I would feel safe and at home. Scotland has massively changed as a country. Scotland is now the welcoming place. It’s the place that opens its arms and says, come on in.”

Jackie Kay’s memoir, Red Dust Road, is published by Picador. She makes several appearances at the Edinburgh International Book festival in August, including one with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy www.edbookfest.co.uk