When they heard us coming the villagers gathered in the mist and waited for my companion to explain who I was. After he’d done this briefly, as best he could, they gave me a meal of bread and curds. Then, with a muted apology, my guide took the violin from its bag and handed it to me delicately, like a new-born lamb. I was now used to this reception - the ritual gift of food, followed by the offered instrument and the expectant silence. I remember the villagers as they listened, blankets held to their throats... I felt I could have been with some lost tribal remnant of seventeenth-century Scotland, during one of their pauses between famine and massacre - the children standing barefooted in puddles of dew, old women wrapped in their rancid sheepskins, and the short shaggy men whose squinting faces seemed stuck between a smile and a snarl. << less