I was over in Oban a couple of weekends ago with Jeff, Devon and Ally. We all were there to attend the wedding of a couple of old school friends of ours, but I had the additional responsibility of piping the bride-to-be up the aisle. (“Piping up the aisle” is neither a cake-filling technique nor prison slang* but instead the act of playing the bagpipes to provide music for the prospective bride’s procession up the aisle with her father.) The last time I’d played the bagpipes like this had been more than three years ago, over in Brisbane at Chris & Leyla’s wedding, and to say I was preoccupied with this new task is to understate the case a little. I could think of nothing else.

* * *

The week before the wedding was a bit of a trial. I’d been playing the pipes a couple of times a week all through January and February, but I’d hit a bit of a plateau. In an attempt to finally reach a standard appropriate to playing at the most important day of someone’s life, I booked six consecutive sessions at Banana Row for this final week. Each night (and twice on Thursday), I traipsed along to the studio to play the pipes until my lips turned to rubber and I could blow no more. For the uninitiated, this is a bit like having a balloon stuck inside your mouth and inflated until your cheeks are so taut you could shine a torch through them.

After each night’s practice I would walk tensely home, shifting my pipe case from hand to hand as my right arm stiffened up with the weight and the cold, while my free hand silently played its particular half of Highland Wedding over and over again. I’d collapse on the couch, throw the ball around for Maisie, blether to Ash, and then find it impossible to get to sleep because my mind was still uncontrollably vaulting through this tune or that one.

For no particularly good reason, then, I found myself watching Wallander on iPlayer almost every night, trying to zone out a bit so I could get some sleep. It should be crap: Kenneth Branagh seems to have patterned Kurt Wallander after Brian from Spaced, all mumbles and awkwardness; the script is stilted and clipped, as if the actors are reciting the subtitles to the Swedish version, and it’s riddled with general cognitive dissonance like ‘Polis’ cars (I mean, is it set in Glasgow?) and characters reading Swedish postcards out loud in English. Yet despite all of this, it’s weirdly compelling. Maybe my critical defences were down, taken up with worrying about bagpipe tuning and song structures, but I was hooked: each night I watched Kenneth Branagh gloomily drive a Volvo through beatific Swedish landscapes until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

Which is, let’s face it, a bit weird.

* * *

I drove the four of us over to Oban in a rented Ford Focus on the Friday afternoon, through increasingly beautiful scenery. We arrived in town in time for dinner in a portside pub (‘waterfront’ seems too genteel a term for a situation which can be more accurately described as ‘next to the ferry terminal’), and our group gradually accreted more and more of the wedding guests as the night went on. We decanted decamped to another pub nearby called Auley’s.

Auley’s boasts of “the warmth and special welcome of a real Scottish pub”. Perhaps I’m being churlish, but normally I consider surly bar staff and a jukebox stocked with happy hardcore to be mutually exclusive to offering a “warm and special welcome”. Then again, someone told me later that out Auley’s is a favourite of Oban’s contingent of Rangers supporters, so perhaps by “the warm and special welcome of a real Scottish pub” they mean “a Glasgow kiss”.

Hell, I don’t know. I do know that they sold us beer and I got shitfaced as a result, so I can’t really judge too harshly. We commandeered the jukebox after its under-age guardians had departed and queued up round after round of Led Zeppelin and the like. The night took on a rosier tint.

We were turfed out at closing time, and back at the hotel I fell into a deeply unsatisfactory sleep.

* * *

O God, I thought as my phone rang. What time is it?

It was the morning of the wedding day, it was 9am, and Jeff was calling to ask if I wanted to join everyone else for breakfast. I declined. I did not want to join them for breakfast, because I was unsure that I’d be able to keep breakfast down. I went back to sleep, or at least tried to.

The room phone rang a short time later and down it a receptionist bellowed at me at entirely unnecessary volume, asking would I mind moving my car? It is blocking someone else in. Frankly, I did mind. But I did it anyway, pulling on last night’s clothes to stagger downstairs past reception with matted hair and corrosive breath, edged the car forward six feet out of the parking bay and then reversed back in again. I climbed heavily back to the room and got back into bed.

My mobile then rang again. This time it was my Mum in the lobby downstairs, coincidentally at the hotel to meet some other wedding guests. She asked if I was up and about, and did I want to go to breakfast? I still did not. I apologised, hung up and buried my head under the pillow.

Just as I’d managed to doze off again, my mobile’s alarm went off. It was 10am. I snoozed it and hid under the pillow.

My phone beeped a few minutes later, signalling the arrival of some spam text or other. I silenced it and groaned in frustration but eventually threw in the towel, getting up when my phone’s snoozed alarm sounded scant seconds later to finally goad me out of bed. I was supposed to be at the wedding by 1pm so I could tune up and be ready for the wedding party to arrive at 2pm, but I had two and a half hours in hand to get ready. I showered, shaved, ironed my shirt, got dressed, fitted a new cover and cords to the pipes, dropped my phone into my jacket pocket and looked at my watch: 1pm.

Shit.

(To be continued.)

* Having said that, who am I to say it isn’t prison slang? Perhaps burglars and benefit fraudsters in the Bar-L find themselves being “piped up the aisle” with alarming regularity.