Stockpile

The fan is a bit of a hoarder, especially when it comes to food. Nothing pleases him more than a well-stocked larder with one, two, or even three spare jars, packets, bags, boxes or tins of everything. I, on the other hand, find that too much food makes me feel panicky. What? Must I eat all of this stuff? Our fridge is currently stuffed with the pickles that are needed for a perfect Boxing Day lunch. That was great on Boxing Day, but now it has been and gone I am starting to feel more than  little depressed by the sheer weight of food. I have visions of myself still eating cheese and piccalilli sandwiches in October.

I'm feeling a little similar about my new stockpile of new tunes: gorged and overfed, until I really don't fancy the look of any of them. I've been focussing on a few, and some of the others have been pushed to the back of the musical larder.

Having said that I very nearly got an extra tune yesterday when I discovered that the McGillivray who wrote the Duncan McGillivray tune (for his father), is the man who runs the Pipe Tunes website, and he makes the tune available there. I've been aware of this site for a while. It looks expensive (but mostly because a Canadian dollar is worth barely 50p) and I'm not sure how many of the tunes I would actually want.

For some reason this got me thinking about the Heights of Dargai, which I've tried before. A google led me to a discussion about the Dargai/Dashai confusion and then I tried again to find the dots, and they turned up on the website of the Kilbarchan band. Having got them and compared them with the version I had before (from The Session) I can't see why neither the fan nor I could work the tune out from those dots. Anyway, it's a great tune and I played it a lot on the chanter yesterday.

Despite the chanter practice my fingers struggled to sit on the A today, and it took 15 minutes or so to settle in, but then bag and bellows and everything came together and the fan noted how mellow the A was sounding. I stuck with the Club, Murray, Rocks, Dragon and Dargai and then switched to D and played the Glomach/Balmacara set. I didn't even look at the other tunes and left them to moulder, other than a quick canter through Troy, just because one of these days I am going to be able to play that blasted tune and I don't want it getting lost at the back of the larder behind all the new stuff.