Auld Lang Syne

I won’t forget the words of the art guard in the Aberdeen Art Gallery. ‘Och lassie, it’ll change yer life’, he beamed, when I told him I was off to Shetland for the Folk Festival. Thinking back to 2005, I’m not sure what he meant. Did he think the festival, or Shetland, would change my life? Or did something in him pick up on my family links to Shetland and Orkney, which I only discovered two years later? Well anyway, I like remembering that the journey I’m on began with a laugh at a comment I thought was fanciful. The Shetland Folk Festival did alter my course. The haunting Celtic tunes playing from fiddles, accordions, whistles, pipes and drums stayed with me so powerfully that three years later I found myself living in Scotland, attending Shetland’s ‘sister’ Orkney Folk Festival, and again following traditional tunes down cobbled streets into pubs, halls, hotels, churches, the magnificent St Magnus Cathedral and the Pickaquoy Centre, where a thousand people, mostly Orcadian, had come to hear The Scottish Fiddle Orchestra. It was one wonderful thing to have the principal piper walk through the audience as he ‘piped in’ the orchestra of more than 80 fiddles, double basses, cellos, accordions, flutes and percussion, and to have the principal conductor, whose own fiddling stems from Orcadian roots, conduct a moving repertoire of reels, slow airs and tone poems of local significance. But for the orchestra to play out, joined by the island’s Kirkwall City Pipe Band and Orkney’s top fiddle-playing children, in a hundred-fiddle-strong performance of Auld Lang Syne, for which the audience instinctively stood, crossed their arms and held hands to sing to the beat of drums, was truly quite another.