The Season Begins

The first competition of the season is on Saturday. The band is not ready.

In order to compete at all, a band requires six pipers. We have ten, if we include absolutely everyone in the band who can lift and play a set of bagpipes at all. Of these, two are learners who just aren't quite at the required standard. They'll be really useful pipers next year, and for gala days and other events, but they're just not quite at competition standard. We have one other piper who, although a really nice guy, simply won't ever be at competition standard, for various reasons that I won't go into here.

Still, that leaves seven pipers available, which should be plenty. Problem is, two of the remaining pipers have been extremely sporadic in their attendance at practices. This has led to their falling behind the rest, which in turn has fed into their non-attendance.

Of course, in order to compete, a pipe band must also field a drum corps. Here, numbers is not our problem. Unfortunately, due to various family problems, our lead drum instructor has not been able to attend more than a couple of practices this year. This means that he hasn't been able to instruct our drum corps in what they need to know for the competition, with all the problems that spring from that.

So, it will be interesting to see how we get on on Saturday. I'm trying to take the view that we're in it for the experience alone, and that our goals must all relate to next year, but that's hard. By nature, I'm too competitive for my own good, and the notion of going into a competition knowing we'll almost certainly come last is anathema.

After this one, the next competition isn't until the first of June, which will give us three weeks to take stock and attempt to put things right. With a huge amount of luck and dedication, it might be possible to get one of our learners up to the required standard, and if we could persuade one of our absentees to attend all six practices, that might be enough to catch up. I'm not sure what we would do about the drumming, though; it's fundamentally weakened by the loss of the instructor...