Comic relief?

The piping and drumming world is full of incredibly funny people. Maybe it’s a result being so wound up by competition that pipers and drummers enjoy taking the piss out of most things.

It is funny, though, that we come across as a bunch of humourless pucker-arses to those not in the club. Contests are so often full of long and worried faces,  as if players are about to go over the top of the trench. Pick up any piping publication (with one notable exception), and it’s all terribly serious articles and reporting with a heavy air of “authority.” Not a trace of humour in any of them unless it’s some inside joke with other “authorities.”

It’s a shame that we can’t lighten up a bit more on the outside, like we do on the inside at band practices and at competitions. We are so often a bizarre lot of competitive fanatics and traditionalist zealots. If our extraordinary spectacle isn’t occasionally amusingly absurd, nothing is.