As the good weather was trying to return, as it always does in September, I found myself northbound on a Scotrail locomotive to Inverness. It is always nice to return to my home parts, but this was not just a family visit.

My father has for a couple of years now been the driving force of a charity which he founded, called ‘For the right reasons’. This charity chiefly deals with the problem of addiction, predominantly Heroin and Alcohol addiction.

A year or so ago, my Father and I were discussing the fact that there happened to be a number of good venues in Merkinch that rarely get used for the arts and that it was high time someone remedied this problem. So, the idea was born. ‘Why don’t we put on the 1^st Merkinch Folk Festival and see how it goes. You bring the music from Edinburgh and I’ll get the community excited by the whole thing,’ bellowed my father from behind the wheel of his rusty, V reg transit van.

Now I immediately had many reservations but somewhere in the back of my mind I knew my father was on to something. Despite my logical arguments and my infinite questioning, my father’s relentless positivity won the day and so I set about trying to organise a few bands to come and play.

After much ambitious brain storming we finally settled on two nights of music on the 4^th and 5^th September 2009. The Friday night was to be held in the newly opened Grant Street Coffee Shop and was to be a preview to get the community excited about what was to be a more grand and conventional concert on the Saturday in the Merkinch Community Centre.

The Paul Mckenna Band were first up on Friday. They arrived after a long drive north, all packed into a Vauxhall estate. They looked a little bemused, as anyone would of, when I invited them into a café filled with ex-addicts and a lot of kids aged anywhere between 6 and 15. The main hurdle for us was that these people had no real experience of gigs. Of course I’m generalising but it was clear that keeping the attention span of this audience was going to be a tough task.

We sorted this problem with the running of an ‘Open Mic’ competition. In order to keep the crowd interested we had to have local input and what’s more, this whole festival was for this community and needed local performers. We were treated to a young boy named Jay, who at seven years old had little fear of standing in front of 50 people and singing along to Caledonia. Then, we discovered the MP33 guitar group, a group that had been learning guitar together just across the road from this very venue. They entertained us with a rousing version of ‘Star of the County Down’. It was great to see this enthusiasm for folk music though, coming out of the cracks when given the opportunity.

The Saturday night concert was a huge success. We had another 50 people through the doors and they were entertained again by the open mic folks, Lucy Pringle and Chris Wright and again by the Paul Mckenna Band. We alas made no profit for the charity but we did not make a loss either. ‘What’s the point’ I hear you cry. But the objective was to see if it would work in this particular community. It undoubtedly did and we now can build on the success and do it as an annual event and money might well be made eventually.