I find it hard to believe that in my early twenties I managed to blog around three times per week. These days, due to time-restrictions, I barely manage once a month. What did I do back then? The trouble with blogging this sporadically is that when I write a blog post, I feel that I really ought to be writing about something of monumental importance, rather than just, well, a blog post.

Anyway. I’m going to write about something that isn’t monumentally important, in order to take the pressure off.

Yesterday evening I played at a ceilidh. Prior to the gig, there were a couple of setbacks. Firstly, the accordion player’s knee was badly damaged in an incident which apparently involved the concertina player and a towel. Then the guitarist, who’d organised it (the ceilidh, not the knee-damaging incident), phoned the rest of the band at about 5pm to say that it was a 7pm start rather than 8pm. Minor panic ensued. However, despite both of these things, we got to the venue almost on time, set up and played the first half, as usual.

Then there was a break for the buffet. [At this point a slightly scary man admired my new spats (yes, those are the actual ones, and I am possibly more pleased about them than any other item of legwear ever), spent the rest of the evening making comments about them and possibly may have winked once. But this is a digression.]

On the buffet table, [insert fanfare here] there were two little bottles of hand sanitiser! Somebody had clearly thought this through. At ceilidhs, the formula is usually dance, eat a buffet, dance. (Generally overlaid throughout with drinking.) During the dances there is a great deal of hand-contact, often with quite a lot of people (especially if there’s a grand chain involved, or if it’s a progressive dance in which dancers change partner every time through). That’s potentially a lot of free transport for germs, immediately followed by the potential-transporters eating a bunch of food.

Quite a few of ceilidhs that I’ve played at serve a hog-roast in the middle, eaten in sandwiches. That means eaten with your fingers, which have just been holding lots of other fingers – and I don’t see lots of people queuing up to wash their hands before the buffet: they go straight from the dance floor to the food. And there isn’t usually any hand sanitiser. Yikes.

So: hand sanitiser is definitely a good thing for ceilidhs, especially if, like me, one has buggered up one’s immune system by having ten serial colds over winter. I urge all ceilidh bands and also normal people to suggest it to anyone they know who might be organising one: if it becomes standard practice we could collectively save the NHS what will probably turn out to be a really small amount of money, but, you know, it’s still something…

(Also. While you’re there. Tell them that Standard Ceilidh Organising Practise is to provide the band with some nice Australian Shiraz, a good quality cheesecake, interesting salads with decent vinaigrette, assorted delicious proteins and carbohydrates, heated seats, disco lights, and a party bag to take home. But mainly this is about the hand sanitiser.)