Well, that is global culture for you. As the use of the bagpipes spread from India to Rome, there must have been a point when it crossed the Middle East. There, I supposed as I sat, a residue of their music must have clung on through the centuries as a few redoubtable souls kept the ancient tradition alive, playing traditional Jordanian airs like the one I was listening to.
And there was something familiar about the music. No doubt the influence of the East had swept up through Europe so that their tunes had become contained in ours.
After a little, I found myself humming along and, before long, I began to remember some words. English words to be sure, but no doubt the work of some erudite translator.
"There where the hills are sleeping,
"Now feel the blood a-leaping,
"High as the spirits of the old Highland men."
Odd, really, I had never thought of there being highlands in Jordan. Hills and mountains perhaps but not highlands as such. Maybe in ancient times? Perhaps I had made an important anthropological discovery.
It was the returning memory of the words "Scotland, my mountain hame" which burst the bubble. I was not listening to some ancient relic of musicality left over from the first century but rather to a tradition adopted by the Jordanian army from the British during the war.
I had nothing to add, then, to the internet guidance that bagpipes had worked their way across the world and had arrived in England with the Romans. Still, when the high road of scientific discovery is not available there is always the low road of political correctness. Why are the Scots playing our instrument? We have given them back the stone of Scone - shouldn't they give us back the bagpipes?
If you are an Englishman, the answer depends upon whether you like the bagpipes or not, and that is a difficult question as it depends on the context in which you hear them.
Suppose you are in a foxhole, pinned down by snipers. You are out of ammunition and it's looking grim.
Then from behind you comes the skirl of the pipes and a reinforcement of 10,000 kilted highlanders with bayonets fixed. In those circumstances you might find the sound of the bagpipes rather pleasant.
Go to the other extreme - a block of badly soundproofed apartments and the teenager below practising the bagpipes with his friends at three in the morning. Then you might swear that they were worse than the drums.
One of the striking things about the conference at the National Piping Centre is that its predecessors have featured pipes from Sweden, Croatia, Portugal, Spain, India, France, Scotland, England, Belgium and Belarus.
The missing country is, of course, Italy and you wonder how the Roman tradition of bagpipes has failed to survive.
I have a theory - I think that the researchers got their dates wrong and that the bagpipes were in Rome in about 55 BC.
They would certainly have appealed to Caesar who was into bare knees and a Putinesque masculinity. He's just the sort of chap who would have wanted them adopted as the national musical instrument and perhaps he had a plan to do so which he revealed to his friends on the way to the forum.
Perhaps they all lived in houses with teenage children. Perhaps it was March 15 ... the Ides of March.
