THREE

THE PEN AND THE PIPER

A short concentration span in a classroom isn't a choice. It's an affliction. Thirty-five or 40-minute lessons felt like an eternity. Without focus, they're a pointless slog. I would have loved for the words of a teacher to engage and inspire. There wasn't fault on either side that they did neither. I wasn't looking for distraction, but distraction was at hand, figuratively and literally. With a pen or pencil, I could at least put my fingers to some meaningful purpose. Before a curling stone or golf club would become an extension of my arms, it was a bagpipes chanter.

Farming and curling were passed down from Muirhead to Muirhead. There was no such line of succession as far as the pipes were concerned. But I was in the right place to get hooked. Not long after we had moved north, watching the Atholl Highlanders' Parade, when the Atholl Highlanders march the day before the Blair Atholl Highland Games, was love at first sight. The raw sound, the pride that shone out of the band members, the theatre and the pageantry, the tartan and the patriotism. It was a powerful mix. By the time my birthday came round the following April, the desire to learn hadn't dimmed and my present from Mum and Dad was a programme of beginner lessons in Pitlochry. It was equal parts daunting and demanding at the start.

There has been nothing comparable, sporting or otherwise, to the feeling of being at the foothills of a seemingly insurmountable musical mountain.

Every Wednesday night at Pitlochry High School, the greenest of the green like me sat in a maths room, practising as best we could on our chanter, not much different from a recorder, until we were summoned for our half-hour one to one tutorial with the formidable teacher, Gillie McNab. Gillie was the first woman to join the Vale of Atholl Pipe Band in the 1960s and had an aura every bit as powerful as any curling coach I ever learned from. For two and a half years it was Gillie and my chanter - mostly at the school, sometimes at the house, or wherever else Gillie could fit me in. Eighteen months passed before I could get even a basic tune out of it. Seeing another pupil progress a bit quicker was frustrating but there were no shortcuts. Like all switched-on teachers, Gillie would know if you hadn't put the hours in between lessons. And, believe me, you didn't want that. She was strict.

Participation in Highland Nights on a Monday in Pitlochry was the first big goal. The tourists loved them. But when I was eventually allowed to join in, they wouldn't have actually heard me play. Until you had reached an acceptable standard, a bit of paper was put under your reed, so you weren't making any noise. The purpose it served was getting you into the rhythm of marching and playing at the same time. We would all meet at the car park behind the Fisher's Hotel, parade down the street to the Recreation Ground, where there would be Highland dancing and singing, and then the band would close the night.

I had given Highland dancing a go around the same time as I started piping lessons but holding on to the back of a chair while doing a couple of steps was as far as that went. Not my thing or not any good? A bit of both, probably.

Music practice in the house would be an hour on the chanter before tea in the dining room. That routine lasted two years, before Mum and Dad bought my first set of bagpipes from Gordon Duncan, one of the best pipers in the world. After 12 months of squeezing and blowing with the drones blocked off, I had reached the three and a half years mark and was, at long last, able to produce a recognisable tune.

A life of band championships and individual competitions were my new horizons. The latter came first. And it was back to the Fisher's Hotel. Competition there was like a mini-Royal National Mod, Scotland's world-famous Gaelic festival. Waiting for the gallows would be the best description I could give that torturous time spent in a room with 20 or so other ashen-faced children for whom entering the under-14 chanter section had turned into a fate worse than death. On occasion, the nerves made me physically sick, but they instilled in me an 'it can't be worse than how you felt at the Fisher's' benchmark that served me well in the sporting arena.

Olympic hopefuls and psychologists could learn a lot in a chanter competition waiting room.

Your talent, temperament and composure are all exposed. Maybe not to a big audience but exposed, nonetheless. In sport, you can physically release nerves. Piping affords no such opportunity. Getting your breathing right is fundamental to being good - try mastering that when just breathing itself feels like a challenge. Blow too strongly or not strongly enough and the flat sound is painful on the ear, as I'm sure judges of my 15-minute pibroch would attest.

Solo piping was for yourself, your personal pride and the approval of your teacher.

Being part of a band in a Scottish, British, European or World Championship - that was about camaraderie, shared responsibility and determination to not let the group down, the like of which no team sport could match. By the time I was a fully functioning juvenile band member at the age of 14, the discipline, dedication and time management that had been ingrained into me through piping was greater than anything else I had pursued or would go on to pursue. And if you weren't in control of your nerves and your instrument, this was a brutal, unforgiving environment.

The World Championships were, as the title would suggest, the piping peak. They always took place on Glasgow Green. It was still dark when we got on the bus and the sun was barely up by the time we got off it. If you didn't sound good in the morning tune-up, forget the fact you had put in weeks of practice and made the trip, the band leaders would force you to sit the competition out.

Ruthless.

It never happened to me, mercifully. But I saw it a few times and it wasn't pleasant - travelling for hours to not even play so much as a note. For those who didn't get the dreaded tap on the shoulder, band by band you would inch your way closer to the start line, nerves and adrenaline building. Then the drums roll and that's you. Sweat on your brow, lips getting tighter, throat drier and breaths shorter.

'Just don't mess up, Eve. Don't let it be me.'

After you've marched out, you're in a circle. If there's a mistake made, everyone in the band knows who was responsible. And pipe majors hear everything. For learning how to control nerves, this is the stuff money can't buy.

We didn't become world champions in my time, didn't really have a near-miss, but we would have been contenders if there had been a world champion title for enjoying ourselves. Pipe hard, party hard.

If you were in a band, you travelled abroad. My first competitive excursion out of Scotland wasn't a sporting one. It wasn't a particularly enjoyable one either, mind you. A 14-year-old, not very confident piper who didn't speak a word of German being given lodgings with a family who barely spoke a word of English wasn't a recipe for a fun trip. It was a recipe for a homesick teenager who couldn't get back to Blair Atholl quickly enough.

France a couple of years later was a bit different. My friend, Katy Scott, and I were quite a combination over there. We were a piping, turned drinking, double act.

Katy took up the side drum about the same time as I started my lessons. She lived in Glen Tilt, and I would often head up to her house on my dirt bike over the spring and summer months. By the time we were reasonably proficient on our instruments we became a busking duo. Both of us kilted up, the customers at the Blair Atholl fish and chip shop, just off the Main Street, were the first to be treated to our set list. We couldn't have been too bad because the owner gave us £5 each so we must have been bringing in more custom than we were driving away. It was onwards and upwards to the grassy hill outside The House of Bruar - The Harrods of the North - where the tourists seemed to find us reasonably agreeable. Well, apart from one, whom my dad overheard in the shop saying: 'I hope the heat gets too much for those two.'

Peak earner was Princes Street in Edinburgh, at the corner of the famous department store, Jenners. A day's shopping for Mum and £100 or so each for Katy and me. Believe it or not, back then, there weren't actually a lot of buskers to beat us to a prime city centre pitch. Putting yourself in the spotlight, under a bit of pressure, is never a bad thing. Doing it in a pre-smartphone era was probably a blessing, though.

Our first taste of alcohol would have been on a bus back from a piping championship on the west coast. There was always a lot of drink bought for the return trip - beer, gin, vodka, Pimm's, cider. I started out on the latter. Brittany in the summer of 2006 was all about beer, though - its strength and its consequences. After one big night in Lorient, when the Grimbergen Challenge of downing pints of the stuff had taken its toll, Mum, who was one of the parent helpers, had to put me and Katy to bed. Unfortunately, she wasn't on the beach the following day to look after us. Katy's attempt to rub sun lotion on to my back left a lot to be desired and after we fell asleep, I woke up red raw, save...