I did not wear my kilt today because I was dancing on the radio.

Maybe that's obvious, but perhaps I should explain.

I was invited to our local radio station to help publicise a day of dance throughout England on 22 July that will involve all kinds of dances. The idea was to teach the presenter several new forms of dance during the three hour show. We were invited to do the Scottish Country Dance section.

Naturally I considered going along in the kilt. After all I ALWAYS wear my kilt to dance, even to practice classes. And I have absolutely no qualms about wearing a kilt in public, I do that regularly. Even more so lately because it has been so hot here in England.

The problem was that the day of dance is supposed to encourage more people to take up dancing as a healthy hobby. We will be contributing a one hour slot to this, doing a few demos to show what it is about, then inviting people in the audience to join in. We obviously want to maximise the audience participation both because that is the aim of the day and because we'd like to recruit new dancers to our clubs.

I knew very well that if I had worn the kilt, the whole focus of the interview and our section of the programme would turn on that and the impression would be created that you could only do Scottish Country Dancing if you had a kilt and were prepared to wear it. This is certainly not true, even if it is much more fun to dance in a kilt than in tr****rs. You might not believe this but the thought that you HAD to wear a kilt would put some people off. So I felt I had to make the sacrifice and go bifurcated.

I hope you will forgive this, especially as I am a newcomer to this community, though not to kilt wearing.

I will, of course, wear one of my four kilts – probably the 13oz 8 yard Modern Forsyth (see atavar) that has just been delivered from Geoffrey (Tailor) – for the actual day of dance. Flashing the tartan on those occasions gets the crowd's attention and, we hope, interest.

I wonder how many others have been put into the kind of situation where you might almost say it is expected that you will be in the kilt, where nobody would be surprised if you did wear it, yet you think you had better not?

Or maybe you think I made the wrong choice today?