The session is at that delicate stage of just coming into being. Tracey shyly pulls out her tin whistle to follow along with the tune, Alex tries with his flute but realizes it's in C and he can't play it. The box player encourages him. "I can fix that," and pulls out another concertina in a different key. "What do you know?" he asks Tracey.

Now Alex and Tracey are shy about their musicianship in this land of prodigies. ("I'm a good musician back home," Tracey says. "Here I'm mediocre.") They would rather be in the back of 10 or 15 musicians, not so in front with two others of such stunning virtuosity. Tracey freezes up, "I can't remember a single tune!" She tentatively begins one and the music roars forward again.

Then the dreadlocks arrive. They stumble into the pub, blind drunk, one hauling a bodrain, the other tripping over his guitar case. "Trouble," I whisper to Alex. They haven't changed their clothes in a week, or washed their hair in years. Brown dreadlocks starts pounding away on his toy drum half out of time with the music, black dreadlocks struggles to tune his guitar. The musicians try to give them a signal that they're out of their league, and switch from a reel to a fast jig. Brown dreadlocks pounds away oblivious to the change in tempo. They're not out of their league, they're out of their minds.

What to do? Francis suggests, "Play us a tune now." Big mistake. Brown dreadlocks starts flailing away, raising an awful Native-American-Rainbow-people sort of grunting chant. Black dreadlocks is still flummoxed by his guitar. He turns to me, slurred, "Hey man, do you know how to tune this thing?"

After 10 minutes we get out of there, despite Francis' imploring expression, which says, "Don't abandon us to these animals!"

Winkles, across the street. Here the session is well cooked, rocketing along brilliantly. A set dance forms on the worn wooden floor. What may have been expert feet a few sober hours ago still have a rollicking grand time dancing the East Galway Set, just more bumping into each other. Tracey tells me, "That's all they dance here, all evening, the East Galway, over and over again." It's one of those perfect Irish moments of music and dance that has the centuries echoing through it.

March 2000