Well, he says it to a couple of hundred other people, too, because there we all are at the Vancouver Celtic Festival‘s free concert he gave on Sunday on the Granville pedestrian Mall which has, for once, actually been made off-limits to traffic so you can have things like, say, pedestrians on it and even some pretty nifty concerts, and we are: there we all are, pedestrianating away madly and concerting in a disconcerting manner and all.

Cuz that’s how we roll.

And there he is onstage, Cape Breton‘s greatest living fiddler and that’s saying something, for Cape Breton fiddlers get stalked by degreed Irish musicologists with great notebooks full of stuff about Celtic cultural survivals in exotic lands like, say, Canada.

Now, the lad is a bit of a character, to say the least and, as a Canadian, one would always be tending to say the least, at least until someone had bought you a few stiff drinks, so we shall leave it more or less at that…

And he’s about to launch into another song when he comes over all full-body spasm and spins around like an impaired Tasmanian Devil who can’t afford the whole whirlwind or maybe just has commitment issues and prefers to be a one-twirl Devil, and we think for a moment that he’s having the bloody brain lightning right there onstage, but lo, we are mistaken and mighty guilty-feeling we all are, for yea, the man’s working hard and looking pretty clean for a brain-lightning candidate lately.

Well, relatively speaking.

And he says to us, he says:

“Now, I have to tell you one more story.” And cheers erupt, for he is not half bad at that, either. Multi-talented, that’s our boy. And he says, “I was going into my house in Toronto [and at this point we gasp as we realize how low he’s fallen, to be forced to live in the big T-zero] and I saw this guy outside on my lawn. He had a ballcap on backwards, like this,” he says, helpfully demonstrating, although I doubt the lawn-lurker’s hat is decked out in a big scripty letter A all in bling, “and he had a hoodie with the hood pulled up and he was looking, well, he was looking like he was having a rough day, so I said good day to him and gave him a cigarette and took out my keys and went inside.”

“And,” he says, says he, “a couple of months later I was going in to my house in Toronto and there was the same guy, sitting there, and he looks at me and I look at him and he says, ‘I KNOW YOU!‘ and I think maybe he does, but then he says, ‘and do you know who I am?’ and I say no…”

“And he says, ‘I’m the World Champion Irish Fiddler from Saskatchewan.’” Laughter erupts at this point, wide, deep and long. I mean, have you been to Saskatchewan?

“And I said ‘All right, prove it!’ and I took out my fiddle and my bow and I handed them to the guy. And let me tell you, he was better than I am on most days. So let that tell you…something.”

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