It's just this minute occurred to me - a memory of being called upon to design a poster for a Ceilidh in the Blackhall Mill community centre in the summer of 1983. So out comes my crayons & my copy of George Bain's Celtic Art: Methods of Construction & I set to work with the appropriate lettering & everything turns out just splendidly. Then I think - this was 25 years ago, and by no means the first ever Ceilidh to be held on English soil either, but a Ceilidh nevertheless, with young & old & newly born in glad attendance, with all manner of dances from reels to Strip-the-Willow, with a few songs and maybe a story too. I then reflect that the babies from back then will be in their mid-twenties now, carrying at least a notion of what a Ceilidh is & maybe even passing it onto their own children already.

So, a decade on from that halcyon summer our hapless repatriate fetches up on these shores after his long swim from the Antipodes (how else might I interpret eco travel on a shoe-string budget?) and begins his mission to persuade the English people that everything that they've held to be true hitherto has been wrong all along; that they have purposefully misled their children with their imperialistic spoils, despite the fact that many of them, myself included, were of Irish & Scots descent anyway. Hmmm. More need for ethnic cleansing here I reckon, WAV old fruit - sort out this wretched confusion once and for all.

Hardly the wonder your repatriation isn't going well; you're in Rome for God's sake - so do as the Romans do!