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I understand the desire to read the blogs of those in difficult/dangerous/unusual circumstances, and of course don't feel myself to belong to any of those categories. But to some people, living on an island the size of a postage stamp (well half by quarter mile) might just qualify or all of the above.

I suppose blogging could be seen as the online equivalent of the analyst's chair, talking about yourself and your life. It remains to be seen if bearing my thoughts for all to see will make me any more or less sane. Enough jibbering though, meet Ceilidh Bandido.

Like most people on these islands, I do a number of things to keep a smile on the bank manager's face. My partner and I have The Puffer, Easdale's only pub and restaurant. I play in a few bands, a ceilidh band, a folk band and (bizarrely) a small Portuguese style pipe band. My partner's 'real' job is textile design, and we do the odd graphic design job as well.

All these jobs together allow us to have enough food on the table for our two wee boys (Sorley and Fergus).

That's the background, and I'm quite sure the rest will bore you all to tears.

cheerie

We have our own film club on Easdale (www.easdaleparadiso.com). It meets on the first Friday of every month and last night’s film was Cinema Paradiso, an Italian film about a fatherless boy and his relationship with the projectionist from the local cinema.
I personally thought it was one of the best films I have ever seen. But it really brought to my attention the way ‘art’ affects different people. I opened the bar after the show, feeling like I was going to burst with the joy of the film, and then some of the other islanders arrive (and the 4 from Seil). What did they think I asked… ok, alright, quite good…. somebody even thought it was boring!
Ach well, I suppose if we all felt the same, there would be nothing to argue about in The Puffer of an evening.

Where do little boys get their energy from? It's 6.30 in the morning, and the boys are up and about after half an hour of stalling!
Unfortunately Fergus (2) is too wee to allow downstairs by himself. Fortunately, at this time of the morning, the boys seem quite able to entertain themselves.
I can't complain though, Fiona does the majority of the early shifts with the boys as I work in the bar at night, allowing me an extra few hours sleep in the morning.
Only two and a half hours till nursery!

We're holding an exotic food night in the Puffer on Friday, so I've been wondering which exotic recipe to recreate.
I've decided on the Mexican celebration dish 'mole poblano', providing I can find suitable ingredients in Oban.
This strange (to our tastes) concoction has intrigued me since I first heard about it on a programme broadcast on Radio Scotland.
The unusual combination is chillies with chocolate!
The recipe requires some unusual varieties of dried chillies, which I think I will be unable to find in Oban, so I'll have to botch it.
I'll let you know how it tastes.

My working hours are most certainly not 9 to 5 (hi Dolly). The pub on Easdale only opens 4 nights a week, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. What most people find even more unusual are our opening times - 9pm to 1am. This was the hours when we took over the place, and they seem to work. The pub goers here are infamous (in my household anyway) for being late drinkers. It's not unusual to have the first customer around 11pm. We tried a few times to encourage them to move their drinking habits forward a few hours, particularly when my children were babies - but they wouldn't budge. So, we just go with the flow.



Mike, one of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ crew in charge of this website, recommended for unusual foodstuffs. They have shops in Glasgow and Edinburgh, but more importantly can deliver. Thanks Mike.



Off to work I go!

My band (shameless plug - http://www.ceilidhband.org) were playing at Ardfern in Mid Argyll last night for a christmas dance. This was held in their geodesic dome, in a rather muddy field. So muddy that I got stuck about 10 meters in.... After being towed to the dome by a land rover, we entered the dome to discover the stage was directly beneath the worst drip in the place. I was getting a bit worried by this stage, electrocution not being one of my favourite hobbies, but Namaste and her unshakable optimism sorted us out with a gazebo - on the stage. It looked a bit like an Arabian hareem, but it kept us dry. We played, and the dancers danced.
The exotic food night was a success, as was the mole poblano. The chilli/chocolate combination seems to work!

No not those tunes, proper tunes, diddly di de dum de diddle tunes.
I've been writing tunes on the various instruments I play since the very start. In fact when I first got hold of a tin whistle I didn't know any real tunes, so I made some up.
I've been using the web for about 7 or 8 years now, and placed my tunes on the pub web site (www.pufferbar.com) so that other folk could listen to them and learn them if they wanted. I used ABC software, which seemed most suited to the task at the time, but I've been meaning to make them more accessible for years now.
So what better time to start than now, when I'm unable to remove my dressing gown due to a strange 'sticky dressing gown' bug. Today I started porting them over to my band's website, making each tune available as an image and a midi file as well as an ABC file.
I've a long job ahead of me, I must have written more than 40 now...

So I have just discovered the true purpose of blogging. What do you do when you can't sleep in the middle of the night.
My 'sticky dressing gown' bug has developed into a full blown head cold, and when my head is on the pillow it sounds like a large ship is passing by the island (like all Easdale islanders, I only live a hundred meters or so from the sea, and I can often hear the deep engine throb of passing boats). I presume I'm listening to the sound of my own bloodstream, amplified by blocked sinuses.
I've made a good start on my new tunes page, although it is quite slow work. First of all I tidy up the abc's, then make sure the dots look good, then export it as a midi file. Check them out here -

The irony!! You can only laugh, being called 'mundane' by that cutting edge publication, The Oban Times.
Then i had a look at my dictionary (admittedly it is very old) and discovered this -
mun·dane - of this world, worldly, of this universe.
So i suppose all the rest of the bloggers should be writing to the OT letter's page to deny allegations of not being of this world