Stuck at home

Today I am housebound, not even daring to open the front door and poke my nose out to see if the front path is still an ice slick. I must wait, before I go out, until a tall dark handsome man comes to my door bearing gifts, else all my good luck for 2011 will go flying out the house. This Scottish tradition, First Footing, is taken very seriously, and all the local women, like me, will be waiting to be feted with a piece of coal, shortbread and a nip of whisky:

Eric has said he will come around today after his dinner, which I think will mean he is here sometime after midday. He did point out that he is ‘nay tall’, so I suggested I would put a box outside the front door for him to stand on.

Last night, with my husband Mark who is here for a few days for Hogmanay, we somehow made our way up the back lane which is now so treacherous at times we just stood still whilst still sliding on a block of ice, trying to keep upright whilst working out how to move forwards. When we reached the pub, it was packed full with about 40 people – and unaccustomed to such a crowd, by 10 o’clock it ran out of ice. A girl piper was accompanying a guitarist who sang Scottish and Irish traditional songs, with a smattering of Steeleye Span, Bob Dylan and Gerry Rafferty.

We shouted to be heard above the noise; and Mark valiantly conversed with Eric, neither understanding a word of what the other said, foreigners bonded by their common language – in this case, Famous Grouse.

I thanked Eric for turning on my radiators for our return. He said when his phone beeped in his jacket pocket, his workmate told him he must have a text message, and read it out to Eric who had never received one before. “Aye, and there was another one from a lady wanting some work doing,” he said, quite aghast that business could be conducted this way. I looked at his short fat carpenter’s fingers and asked if he had replied. He said something incomprehensible in Gaelic.

We heartily joined in the singalong to those ballads we knew – On the Banks of Loch Lomond, I’ve been a Wild Rover – and after several whiskies, even those we didn’t know.  When the girl piper brought out her bagpipes, her haunting melody had even the grown men in their kilts a little teary-eyed.

Sandy leaned across at one point and asked me if I knew what song the lad was now playing. I was surprised he didn’t know it, because apparently – I said – it was the Celtic Rangers football team’s song.

“I dinna ken it,” said Sandy, who commented on this to a be-kilted Henry. Oh well – what would a foreigner (or Englisher, as Elaine likes to say) like me know – it turned out, after some confusion, that it was a Celtic (Irish) folk song.

Capitalising on the tourist’s thirst for a Scottish experience at New year, Neil, who is an illustrator and also a tour guide at Edradour Distillery, has gone to London with his bagpipes to busk. At last reports, he had already earned over two hundred pounds.

 As midnight loomed, the band stopped but Eric – by now several whiskies this side of Inverness - asked for one special request, “Bonnie Dundee”.  The Dundeeites sang til their lungs burst but then Val, herself from Dundee, leaned across and said, conspiratorially, “Dundee, it’s a horrible place”.

At two minutes to midnight the landlord began banging the bar and shouting, “Everybody out! Everybody out!” which I thought was a bit rich, closing the pub before we had seen in New Year.

People grabbed their coats and shuffled out into the road outside, many of us still clutching our drinks (for warmth). Then from behind the pub, fireworks were set off, a display to rival anything in Sydney London or Edinburgh, and the bagpiper piped Auld Lang Syne.

“I hate fireworks,” Elaine kept lamenting, but nevertheless she steadfastly kept looking up to the sky. We let off paper lanterns, with fires lit inside, and watched as 2010 drifted away over the dark sky across the Highlands.