Medjugorje! We were in Bosnia-Herzegovina on holiday in the summer of 2006, and, having lately read Randall Sullivan's The Miracle Detective, we were both keen to visit the village where my girlfriend experienced what can only be called a religious reawakening. A Bosnian Roman Catholic by birth, she'd lapsed as teenager when she'd moved to England (aged fourteen) with her aunt at the onset of the troubles. I met her some ten years later as a vague sort of eco-folky-pagan, but after her experience in Medjugorje, all that went out the window and within a month she astonished us all when she announced she was moving back out there. We do get the occasional postcard, assuring us of her continuing affections, but, as I hinted above, her departure has brought myself and her aunt (who is six years older than my girlfriend and six years younger than myself and bears more than a passing resemblance to the young Granma McAlatia...) onto the brink of an old fashioned sort of romance - bagpipes, rusty or otherwise, notwithstanding!

On that note, I play a set of very unrusty Goodacre Leicestershire Bagpipes in an amateur early music group where we play works by Walther von der Vogelweide once a month in each other's front rooms. I also play Moeck Renaissance alto and tenor recorders and a Moeck Baroque oboe, but only ever privately on account of my nervous constitution.   

Dad Van Fisk

PS - I remember there being a Northumbrian bagpipe museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in a castle near the old Bridge Hotel where I used to go to the folk club in the seventies. I couldn't find it last time I visited, so do I gather correctly that it's moved to Morpeth?