LowProfile
I play mostly English and Scottish, but also some Irish. My highland Scottish mother went to school in Belfast and some of the tunes she would hum and the songs she would sing were Irish, so I knew lots of Irish tunes, as well as English and Scottish, before I ever found a session.
My father bought me my first mandolin from a Blackpool junk shop for my ninth birthday. It was a consolation prize because he had confiscated, yet again, the recorder I had stolen from my mother. I had taught myself to read music after a fashion and I could play nursery rhymes and Jacobite tunes by ear on the recorder and I imitated the wind in the chimney and made up funeral marches. I did the old-style police siren very nicely. No parent could put up with that for long.
I worked through the mandolin tutor, achieving Santa Lucia in temolo, but the strings broke and I didn't know you could buy new ones, so I bought myself a Chinese harmonica and played it in the outside toilet. Uncle Bill (a Scottish great uncle by marriage) taught me how to play a comb and tissue paper.
I bought new strings for the mandolin and played nursery rhymes to my son, who preferred listening to records. "Shut up!" was all the applause I ever got. When I was thirty I walked into a Macclesfield pub where someone was playing the Trumpet Hornpipe on a mandolin. So that's what you do with them!
For years after that I played mandolin badly in Irish sessions. I knew lots of tunes. Then my partner started playing melodeon and it was obvious the mandolin couldn't cope. I went back to recorder and still play it in English and Scottish sessions.
In the meantime I have aquired a hurdy gurdy, a cittern, a guitar, an autoharp, a tenor mandola and I am currently looking after the two family fiddles. Musical instruments are prettier than most pets and they make less mess and don't die if you forget to feed them.
Tunes in LowProfile's tunebook: 20