Tartan Tinnitus

Tartan tourist shops do not aid the meditative process. I know this from personal experience. My favourite church in Edinburgh is St John’s way up the west end of Princes Street. It is a placid place and I like to sit for half an hour and clear my head and just breathe. This I attempted to do the other day, grab a little urban peace in the warm city, but I was prevented from doing so by a rather unexpected source.

I don’t know if I just hadn’t heard it before, or wasn’t aware of it, but I became conscious of the irritating combination of bagpipes and a rock-style backing track. At first I was trying to discern what the tune was (once you’ve heard ‘Hey Jude’ played by bagpipes there’s no going back, you have to deal with it and move on), but having done that, my attention was consumed by how incessant it was; one tune just morphed into another. Could be the old classic ‘Ye Cannae Shove Yer Granny Aff the Bus’ and straight into ‘No Woman No Cry’. Whoever had compiled this nightmare tape was either on some state-sponsored work programme for the emotionally distraught, or an evil, cackling japester on strong dope. Whatever was the case, my meditation was ruined.

Some while later I happened to be in one of those very-same bagpipe boutiques looking for some little oddity or amusement to buy my niece. A Loch Ness monster gonk or a ‘see-you-jimmy’ Tam O’Shanter perhaps (Russ Abbot has a lot to answer for). I happened to ask a couple of the staff there whether the music drove them mad. They both looked at each other and then back at me and nodded in the affirmative, one said in an accent either Spanish or Italian, ‘yes, very much’.

These poor people, I thought. Hard enough living in a strange country, but to have to endure this? I could imagine them after a long days shift with no escape from the continuous dirge and drone of bagpipes massacring otherwise pleasant tunes one after another, sitting in a quiet bar together trying to shake the bagpipe induced tinnitus out of their heads, and plotting a way back to the relative sanity of the Mediterranean.