I'm currently giving very serious thought to buying an electric bass

Check out the Ashbory if you can find one - a tiny electric fretless, with weird fat translucent white plastic strings that look like roundworms. Lovely sound, highly portable, great value for money, and works great for music where you need microtones.

I could add that it's not the hardware that makes things English, but the software of culture. The Northumbrian Pipes, for example, may have originated on foreign shores, but the actual musical vocabulary is unique to the region [...]

I've found the Transylvanian double whistle (ikerfurulya) in A works great for Scottish pipe tunes. It's got a built-in drone.

The Highland pipes were an English invention, more than 500 years ago. Wouldn't be much music for them if the Scots hadn't seen the potential.

On Sunday I was playing mostly Scottish music in a session in Edinburgh. The instruments I used were the green plastic Yamaha recorder you can see in the photos on my website, a Turkish G clarinet, the ikerfurulya, G sopranino and G alto recorders made by Susato in North Carolina, an oud from Syria in classical Arabic tuning, and a washboard adapted by yours truly from one bought in Peebles a few years ago and which I think might possibly have been made in Scotland originally, using thimbles which might have been German or American. Nobody told me the result didn't sound Scottish.