If only we took bagpiping more seriously?

As a young and desperate reporter I once phoned the Grand High Bagpiper of Auld Caledonia searching for a story.

That wasn’t his real title of course he was something like the Muckle Windbag of the College of Piping but his attitude was definitely Grand and Caledonian.

I was hoping he’d regale me with chummy anecdotes about hilarious mishaps and heart-rending moments at public engagements. Something to make the news-weary reader chuckle or gasp over their Sunday morning bacon roll.

But I could almost hear his lips drawing back as he proceeded to destroy my youthful enthusiasm by suggesting that the world would be a better place if newspapers took piping seriously instead of retailing “human interest” stories. (The inverted commas were his.)

I refrained from replying that the world might be a better place if he and his ilk removed the chanters from their fundaments. But my attitude to piping has been tainted ever since.

It wasn’t helped when a successor of the Grand Muckle complained about the number of pipers busking on our streets, claiming they were harming piping’s image. That would be the image of fat, red-faced men who know the staple half-dozen bagpipe tunes and will play them at your wedding for a bottle of Glenmorangie and their bus fare home.

I mention all this because I can’t help noticing that the Highland Games season is well under way at least I presume that’s the explanation for the increase in kilts being worn with white vests and telegraph poles.

And this being yet another blasted Year of Homecoming with a Commonwealth Games and an independence referendum thrown in, not to mention the Tattoo and the perpetually rain-sodden World Pipe Band Championships, it will be increasingly hard to move anywhere in Scotland without the Rowan Tree, Nut Brown Maiden and Black Bear repeating on you like a bad haggis supper.

As it is, if you turn on Radio Scotland at the wrong moment you’ll get a whole programme devoted to drones. Oh, and did I mention that someone at the end of my street has taken to practising pibroch?

Still, imagine how much more of it there would be if we only took piping seriously.