Bog Myrtle & Peat

The pipe band played a medley of Bonnie Galloway and The Rowan Tree as they marched to the park in the rain. Teams of racing pigeons were stirred to the cloud by the sound, and the pavements were crowded with flags. Shopkeepers leaned in their doorways and kids laughed from an upstairs window as the pipes skirled in the High Street and a fireman with a welephant’s head jangled his bucket for change. Crossing the bridge, the band was reflected in the porter brown water washed down to the town overnight by a storm which had come in from the west. Doomed to die with mould on their heads, a hat-trick of salmon lay in the pools between shopping trollies and traffic cones, swivelling their astonished eyes to find they’d come home to no less a place than Galloway.

The music was a punch to the stomach, just as it always is. Nothing can defuse the rage of goosebumps on your neck when the pipe band’s at march before you. When I was a kid, I used to know half a dozen people in this band. They were our friends and neighbours, and we’d work beside them in the hayfields for the endless feeding of beasts. But the band forced them out of their aprons and overalls into strangely spotless uniforms, and even their faces were redder and swollen at blowing the pipes so I could hardly recognise them. Fixated on synchronicity and bent upon a kind of ceremonial detachment, our friends would vanish beneath folds of tartan and the matched-up curl of black grouse tails. The transformation was most pronounced when the butcher pulled a bass drum onto his belly and trailed a leopard’s skin from his shoulders. He was my biggest friend of all, but he wouldn’t even look at me when I waved and called his name aloud, and I would feel daft for trying. 

If a handful of our friends had been lost to the group, when the pipes played and the snare drums rattled like gunfire, the sound itself stood for all of us together. And I know that it’s only an illusion, and the same old patriotic joke played upon generations of young men who are suddenly primed to weep or fight for the pride of a confected story. But it works, and as the performance turned and marched upon itself in file in the sodden park, I looked out beyond them to the quarry and the hill where I grew up and have lived my life ever since. And all my cynical adulthood was futile to resist the joy of it then, just as when snowflakes fall tumbling on torchlight, or puppies curl up in the straw.