When he shows his latest guest around, some workmen are digging a hole at the foot of the garden, there to plant a flagpole, from which now flies a Scottish saltire, visible from the valley below. A floodlit golf hole is squeezed round the back, together with a walled garden, where Sturrock lords it in his hot tub and hammock.

Here is a Scot who likes to pamper himself. Muttering something about his pride and joy, he leads you inside, and up two flights of stairs to a closed door, where he pauses for dramatic effect. When it is opened, a colourful, sporting neverland is revealed, with "Luggy's Lounge" writ large on the far wall.

As well as a pool table, there is poker, and a bar in the corner, complete with fridge, icemaker and dishwasher. The walls are lined with framed strips, and a cabinet is being built for his medals. On his jukebox are 100 cds. He wanders over, presses a couple of digits, and waits for The Average White Band to go round again.

This is Sturrock's second spell as manager of Plymouth Argyle. He loved it so much the first time, when his transformation of a downtrodden team put the town on the map, he couldn't resist the chance to return nearly a year ago. He adores the club and its people as much as they do him. Add to that the weather, as well as the lifestyle that comes with it, and you can see why this is his retirement plan, or at least part of it.

Now 52, the Scot who was born in Ellon and brought up in Perthshire is setting down roots in what he describes as his "spiritual home". When he is finished with football, he will spend six months of the year here, and six in Dundee. "I love waking up in the morning and seeing the mist coming in. It's a life and a half down here, the best place to live in Britain… by a mile. It has everything. Golf, theatres, sandy beaches, restaurants, scenic beauty, and the people are genuinely friendly. It has everything you need from life, and yet it's out of the way. That's what I love about it most. It's well out of the way."

Sturrock doesn't care for media attention and the pressure it brings. Even before he announced in the summer that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease, he demanded that Scottish journalists in search of an interview could not do so over the phone but would have to travel south to meet him. When he was manager of Dundee United, the club to whom he devoted his playing days, he lasted only two years, suffocated by expectation.

At Home Park, Plymouth, his lungs are filled with the sea air. "Scotland is too insular," he says. "Is insular the right word? Too goldfishy. When you play Celtic and Rangers, you defend, but you get pilloried by the press for it. They say you should have attacked. So the next time, you attack, and you get beat four or five nothing. Then they're saying how naive your tactics were. Managers get dog's abuse up there. Jim Jefferies went through a spell of it. (Craig] Levein had it at the beginning of the season. Jimmy Calderwood's getting it now.

"And by the way, I'm not a great believer in playing for third. There is a falseness to it, a staleness. Don't get me wrong, I love Scotland, and I will manage there again. I do feel I've got a couple of jobs left in me up there, but at this minute, English football has a freshness to it. My problem is I've got too much I want to do in too little time. I'd like to manage a national team, I'd like to manage abroad, I'd like to manage a part-time team in Scotland and I'd like to manage Dundee United again. But I don't think I'll have time to do all that."

Plymouth, at least, have given him the opportunity to be himself in a game obsessed with image. Still smarting from a £250 fine for his "Scumdee" comments after a pre-season friendly against Dundee United, he is no more suited to the celebrity-driven culture of the Premiership than he is to the ambassadorial role charities for Parkinson's disease would like him to fulfil.

Sturrock announced in August that he had been afflicted by the condition for eight years, but he has spent the past three months eschewing the sympathy. "I have had all the societies on, local and national, but I don't want to be used like that, just because I'm in the limelight. I'm prepared to help if there's something to be done, but I'm not prepared to be the focus. I just feel it should be in the background. I've worked solidly for eight years and it hasn't affected me, so I don't see why anything should change."

A persistent, gentle tremor on his left side is controlled by medication, as is a foot flick that has manifested itself in a slight limp. When he found himself lying about the cause, he realised it was time to come clean. "It's been a relief to have it out in the open," he admits. "They had all been saying, 'what's wrong with your foot son?' And I'd be making all sorts of excuses, telling them it was an old injury from my playing days, that kind of thing. I didn't want to do that any longer."

A degenerative disorder of the central nervous system, which can affect speech and movement, Parkinson's has proved to be more manageable than he feared when it was diagnosed, shortly after he began his first spell at Plymouth. "It was a shock," he recalls. "You start looking at Muhammad Ali and the boy (Michael J] Fox, but they are serious, serious cases. I'm going to get bad, I know that, but they tell me there are tablets. There are things on the way that will revolutionise this illness.

"All sorts of things can happen, but really, I don't want to go into it. My wife has studied it in every way, because obviously, she will have a lot to deal with later on, but you don't die from it. In years to come, I know I'm going to get ill, but hey, that's what life's like. They tell me I have a very mild disorder, a bog-standard one. There are people have it much more serious than me. I just wanted it out in the open so that I wasn't hiding anything. Now I've got that out of the way, it's chip paper. In a year's time, I want people to have forgotten that I have it."

Sturrock is not allowing it to hold him back. Advised to exercise more, he is increasing his commitment to golf, and to the Total Abuse Cricket Club, where he says you can fall over, and nobody cares. He is returning to his former role as a restaurant critic for the local rag, with a promise to cut back on the rich food that has made him almost unrecognisable from the scrawny striker who conquered Europe with Dundee United. Once, when he took Plymouth reserves to Southampton, Gordon Strachan rapped him on the chest, and said: "Luggy? Luggy? Are you in there Luggy?"

Sturrock didn't mind. For him, beauty is over-rated, flaws more fun than perfection. He likes his people, and his football, to be warts and all. In 2004, he lasted just five months and 13 matches at Southampton, before leaving amid claims that his style, or rather lack of it, didn't suit the Premiership.

"When you come from the lower leagues, people think you have straw growing out your ears, but I have to admit, I like honest football. I like ... mistakes. I like football you know is going to produce goals, two teams giving everything they've got. I just don't see that in the Premiership. It doesn't excite me.

"And, at that level, there is more to it than just managing the club. You have to be on TV, at every function going, constantly in the eye of the supporters. I'm a different type. I like the sleepy hollow, which is what I call this area. I like the fact that only three press guys come to see me most weeks. I do my work, go home and enjoy life. You aren't under the microscope all the time, like you are in Scotland, or the Premiership."

Sturrock is back doing what he does best, making a little go a long way. Better at improving a bad team than maintaining a good one, his biggest achievements have been with St Johnstone, whose most successful side he built in five painstaking years, and with Plymouth, who had him to thank for two promotions in three seasons. Both were struggling clubs, small enough to let him exert an influence in every department. "I'm a glutton for punishment," he says. "But that's what I enjoy best, dismantling and rebuilding, not just the team but the club. I like my fingers in all pies. I can see myself as a chief executive sooner or later. Not now maybe, but I definitely have it in me."

Likewise, his family have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into every club he has led, from St Johnstone to Dundee United, Plymouth, Sheffield Wednesday, Swindon and Southampton. His daughter, Lisa, is based in Dundee, his oldest son, Blair, is on loan from Swindon to Bournemouth, while Kirk and Aaron, 16 and 14 respectively, still live with Paul and his wife, Barbara.

They, more than most, understand his quirks. The other week, when he decided to watch Kirk play for a local amateur side, Sturrock turned up in a kilt. He says he wants to wear more of them, one for every club he has managed. "I must be getting eccentric in my old age. I'm even thinking of buying a speedboat. It's not my style, but the boys are right into it, and I really want them to settle here. They've been dragged about from pillar to post, and it's been difficult for them changing schools all the time. I never really had a life with the two older ones, so I'd like to have as good a relationship as I can with the other two. If the worst came to the worst, and I had to find another job, I would do a long commute rather than give this place up. The boys deserve it."

Plymouth, the sequel, is his most difficult challenge yet. The club who were second bottom of England's fourth tier when he arrived first time round, have improved their position on the league ladder every year since. He has worked wonders in the West Country before, but not when they are riding high in the Championship, not when they have lost their most valuable players, and not when expectation is out of all proportion to the club's meagre resources.

Peter Halmosi (£2m to Hull City), Dan Gosling (£1.5m to Everton), David Norris (£2m to Ipswich Town) and Sylvain Ebanks-Blake (£2m to Wolves) are among the many who have departed in the last year, leaving Sturrock to fight fire with a water pistol. It hasn't helped that his biggest signing, Steve MacLean, has struggled to settle. The Scottish striker, bought for £500,000 from Sheffield Wednesday, is often denied even a place on the bench.

"I'd rather not have money," says Sturrock, whose best signings have been budget ones. The ambitious, passing game he tried at the start of this season earned his team only two points from five matches, and he has since gone back to basics with what he calls his "honest boys". Paul Gallagher, on a season-long loan from Blackburn Rovers, has been a revelation behind the target man, Rory Fallon, while Chris Clark, a £200,000 signing from Aberdeen, is impressing on the left side of a revamped midfield.

You can take the man out of Scotland, but you can't take Scotland out of the man. Those who expect to see Sturrock back in a dugout north of the Border before his career is out might like to consider this spooky tale: when he was a boy, watching the results coming in, there were four teams he took to, all of them with romantic names. He went on to manage three of them – St Johnstone, Plymouth Argyle and Sheffield Wednesday – but one of them, Heart of Midlothian, has yet to appear on his cv. You heard it here first.