Learning to ride a bike

Had a good practice on Friday. Discovered I could play My Home Town, Leaving Barra and Castle Dangerous from memory. It's bit like stabilisers on a bike. All stabilisers do is allow you to learn to ride with stabilisers. There comes a point where you still need to learn to ride without. Thinking about it just makes you fall off. What I need is the muscial equivalent of my Dad hanging on to the back of my saddle saying "don't worry - I'm right here. I've got you; you wont fall" and then letting go, without me knowing, so that I sail off and I am really riding a bicycle all on my own. And it goes fine until the moment when I twist to look behind to tell Dad something, only Dad isn't there, and I fall off, because thinking about riding a bicycle is harder than riding a bicycle. I was hoping to make a sidebar list of tunes I'm playing, but can't find a way of doing that easily, so I'm going to list them here and re-list at intervals, so I can (hopefully!) see my repertoire expanding. The fan says I should get to know thousands of tunes, but I know that no matter how many new recipes I try each year I always end up cooking the same amount - some of them may be new but old ones slip off. I seem to have a maximum capacity for recipes. Hope my tune capacity is going to be bigger. My current tune list is very small, but I'm slowly dropping out all those that actually suited the chanter better, or that I leanerd because the Fan suggested them - I'm finally building up a repertoire (as I said I wanted) of tunes I've heard and really love (and Ceol Sean is helping with that - going through Tryst the dots for practically all the tunes are on Ceol Sean). So - those tunes. Tunes I can play, with dots, but can do good chunks dotless

• The Atholl Highlanders (dotless on this pretty much since I started with it)
• Leaving Barra
• Castle Dangerous
• The Barren Rocks of Aden
• My Home Town

Tunes I can play with dots only

• Banks of the Allen (although I occasionally get bits of the B part dotless)
• The Rowan Tree

Tunes I am working on at the moment

• Joe McGann's Fiddle

Tunes on my pile of things I really want to learn

• Troy's Wedding
• The St Kilda Wedding
• Heights of Casino
• The Boy's Lament for his Dragon