Nothing like pipes for stirring an even slightly Scottish soul

There is nothing quite so magnificent as a consort of bagpipes in full throat and, quite by coincidence, the past two Saturdays I've chanced upon the City of Dunedin Pipe Band baring its teeth down in front of the dentistry school on Great King St.

On each occasion it was preparing to lead off into the big, bright new world a fresh battalion of University of Otago graduands, learned and proud, beautiful and begowned, the fruits of their wisdom mingling in the summer breeze like the mists of freshly uncorked Champagne.

There is a visceral quality about the sounds of the pipes. It begins with a low resonating rumble in the gut and builds. It drones upwards, the sound thinning, sharpening, caressing nerve ends and finally emerging as an exquisite feverish lament.

It envelops the soul, electrifies the hairs on the back of your neck. I should know: being the wrong side of 50, I have a few.

And I'm not even Scottish. Well, that's not quite true - there is some Scots blood there somewhere, though possibly not as much, or as blue, as my old Gran used to boast.

She produced a mean bowl of porridge did my Gran, and she rarely wasted an opportunity to mention the connection, obscured in the myths of time and as tenuous as the perilous silky strand of web on which a despairing Robert the Bruce watched that desperately determined spider swing.

My late aunt Jeannie Nichol, roses illuminating her cheeks and as giddy as a glass of dry sherry on a hot afternoon, carried on the tradition, embellishing as time and the years allowed.

I'm dredging the memory here, but there was this one-legged woman, Jane Lindsay, noble-born and descended from one of those dudes in the Scottish play - the Thane of Cawdor? - who was in turn reputedly descended from the Bruces.

She married Thomas Seddon in Eccleston, Lancashire, and begat great-great uncle Dick (Richard John), and his sister Phoebe - who married my great-great grandfather, William Cunliffe.

Genealogy is not my strong point but it's kind of romantic and at least offers a glimmer of an explanation as to my standing there unexpectedly shivering, in the slipstream of a pipe band playing Scotland the Brave or some other familiar dirge.

Looking around and seeing the collective pride on the faces of assembled families from all corners of the globe, at every few steps a different language, Mandarin, Korean, Malay, Arabic, Samoan, Tongan, French, New Zealand ... you wondered what they made of this - the ritual of the pipe-band procession, the finery and the fuss - and you realised for many it was the culmination of sweat and dreams, absence and separation, hardship and tears; the sacrifice of generations past and the hope of generations to come.

And it was happening here in our town. Partly, I think, I was shivering with pride.

We need rituals to mark occasions, even if they are in some manner foreign.

I once had an old Italian flatmate - well, he wasn't that old at the time - who had a disarming way of confounding expectations: if he wasn't lecturing on the shortcomings of capitalism, he was expounding on the cul de sac of religion.

A pick'n'mix of all that he could find was best about communism and atheism, he astounded me one day by predicting that when he got married, it would be in a church.

''But you don't believe in any of that stuff,'' I protested. ''How could you?''

He gave me a look of grave disappointment and waved his hands around extravagantly, in that inimitable Italianate fashion which manages to make sense of even the most absurd philosophical non-sequiturs.

''Ah but, Simon, it's all about the ritual. The ritual is magnificent.''

And so it was: these past two Saturdays, the capping march from Great King Street, the short dog-leg up Frederick, then into George and down through shopping central, even single-minded retail therapists stopping to gawp, towards the Town Hall the graduands went, a rhapsodic, resonant, caterwauling of wind and pigskin at their vanguard.

Spine-tingling. And quite magnificent.

• Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.