For those readers not blessed with Scottish DNA, a ceilidh is basically a celebration of Scottish traditional music.

Celebrated, that is, by participants prancing around in a circle for hours on end at 100mph while screaming and thinking you’re going to die if the music doesn’t stop soon. The circumstances leading to this occasion need not detain us here, but basically it all derived from the visit to this, his native land, by George fae Ontario avec his wife and kids.

George is a long-standing JT reader and is therefore, de facto and de jure, a good bloke, so we arranged to meet up during his Scottish visit and offer his party some Scottish hospitality - hence the ceilidh visit. Now, you should bear in mind that your editor had his dancing chip removed on reaching the age of forty, so as not to potentially embarrass anyone by insisting on cutting a rug to the sounds of the day’s popular beat combos, but this removal means that your editor has not tripped (over) the light fantastic for a very, very long time.

What I'd completely forgotten in the intervening years is that ceilidh dancing is completely mad and insanely strenuous.

I can only speculate that the cultural form was originally developed to weed out the elderly and infirm in a community and it must have been very effective because I thought I was going to die at the end up. However that theory, of evolutionary selection by pas de bas, took a bit of a beating at the ceilidh we attended. I spotted her early on, when my eyes were still capable of focussing. An elderly lady, possibly God’s Granny by the look of her, participated in one of the dances early on the evening. I might have got the detail wrong, but I think the relevant reel was called "Charge round the room, screaming like a banshee" or similar.

Whatever, I confidently predicted to my SO and our webmistress that the auld yin would be sitting out the rest of the evening or, alternatively that paramedics would be making an appearance at some stage performing the resuscitation two step. You know it, it’s the one that goes, "Check the airways two, three four, search for a pulse, two, three, four."

Ah, how wrong can you be. Long after your editor left the floor, reduced to an amalgam of screaming nerve-endings loosely held together by a bag of sodden skin and ruptured muscle, God’s Granny was still up there giein’ aw that.

Now this ceilidh was primarily put on for the benefit of tourists, and none the worse for that, but it did make for an eclectic wee crowd. Your editor found himself attempting to explain the finer points of Strip the Willow to members of a bemused French family, an attempt somewhat undermined by the fact that I don’t really speak French and I don’t really understand the finer points of standing upright far less the labyrinthine workings of that dance with nary a willow in sight to strip.

And horrors of horrors, I found myself in close proximity (OK, I was holding hands) to an English youth wearing an English soccer shirt.

But the evening ended well... mostly.

George, it transpired, had only danced with his wife at their wedding thirty years previously, but you wouldn’t have known it as they waltzed round the room together in a frankly Canadian fashion. It always amazes me how well Canadians can dance. I mean, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that those snow shoe things would get in the way, but not a bit of it.

And that English kid? He came over to our table at the end of the night to wave a cheery good bye. Aw, the nice. Unfortunately the warm glow of international fraternity thus engendered was somewhat extinguished when it all kicked off in the foyer later.

OK, maybe it was the adrenaline talking, but I ended up getting into a heated argument with the aforementioned Granny over the literary merits of The People’s Friend vis-a-vis Women’s Weekly and the red mist descended.

Anyway, the nice doctor here in Intensive Care says that I should be up and about again in a few fleeting months.