I was at a musician friend's birthday party the other evening. It was, of course, in a pub. It began quietly, but then the musicians began arriving in numbers and soon every stool had a backside with an instrument attached to it. The music and song arose to the rafters, the bar got busier and busier, the atmosphere became very special indeed. There must have been close to 40 musicians playing together in the wee small hours of the morning, all excellent performers, and there were times when the width and depth and drive of the reels would make the hair stand up on your head and on the backs of your hands. Know that feeling? I was the designated driver for the evening, downing Lucozade, but by the close I was merrily drunk with the sheer joy of it. What a great way to combat the woes of a rising recession. A real tonic. And towards the close of the night, for the first time in years, I again saw the truth of an old saying of my father's - "the Lord is always kind to drunk men and fiddlers!" - because I encountered a character who was both drunk and a fiddler. It is remarkable in this hard-drinking island that it is seldom enough you meet a genuine shambling drunk. About everybody at the party had drink taken, but nobody was obviously drunk. Cynics say that we drink so much nowadays, and so constantly, that our toleration levels are extremely high. This may very well be so. They also point out that the staggering drunks of 30 and 40 years ago were usually men (farmers after a fair?) who drank only very rarely, and accordingly were severely affected when they did. I feel there is a lot of truth in that. Anyway, this genuine shambling nuisance of a drunk almost fell down on top of me away after midnight. He was the classic drunk. His overcoat was open and he was staggering from side to side. He was in his early fifties, wiry and tough. His face was sheened with sweat, his mouth a little open, the hand that he insisted on offering to all and sundry was clammy and clinging. It was difficult to understand what he was saying or trying to say. I did not know him at all, but about everybody around me did. I was mildly surprised they were so tolerant of him. They were more than that. They were respectful, glad he was there. I could not get away from him quickly enough myself. When eventually he disappeared in the direction of the gents I heaved a sigh of relief and positioned myself so that my cold shoulder would be facing him when he returned. A bloody nuisance is what I thought. And I concentrated on the mighty music again and forgot about him. It was about an hour later at least when I next saw him. A kind of hush descended on the musicians at the core of the session, the music stopped briefly and I looked over. There was my drunk, overcoat discarded, sitting on a low stool at the very center of the group. He had a fiddle in his hands, tuning it subtly close to one cocked ear, and I noticed at once he looked almost totally sober as he did so. A guitarist waited next to him as he put the fiddle to his chin and then he began, still against that special hush, and, as Robert Service said in one of his monologues, my God, how that man could play! This was no shambling drunk any more. This was a Celtic maestro in action, the bowing arm as articulate as an orator in full flight, the dancing fingers on the strings like fairy acrobats, the reels that flowed like heather honey, the best by far of the evening. And this was a showman in action too, sometimes taking his fingering hand altogether off the fiddle, just bowing the notes, pulling his audience close to him, the guitarist in perfect time with him, all the other musicians awed by what they were seeing and hearing, every second of every minute garnished with glorious notes. Awesome! And then, after 10 minutes of reels, he switched to that magnificent slow air they call the Coolin, the most demanding of them all, and he played it better and he played it nearer the melancholy marrow of all our bones that I have ever heard it played before. And then, from there, back into a lively reel again, all the toes tapping, a captive audience clearly delighted to be back on a merrier frequency again. We forgot the recession, we forgot where we were, we were glad to be alive and there. This was Fiddler of Dooney stuff that I will never in my life forget. And somewhere in the back of my serene mind I heard the twangy accent of my father Sandy saying that the Lord has always loved both drunk men and fiddlers.