Young Piper's 50 tunes for Doddie

50 days of piping for Doddie's 50th Birthday have finally come to a close for a young Mull piper.

12 year old Archie Johnston, a youth player at Mull RFC, decided he wanted to do something to mark Doddie's 50th birthday and support My Name'5 Doddie Foundation, so he came up with the idea of playing a tune for Doddie every day...for 50 days! So far he has raised more than £2,000.

Archie said: "After the 2017 Six Nations my Dad was trying to get my brother and I interested in the Lions. We didn't really see the point in them as it seemed to be only for Wales, Ireland and England players. Anyway my Dad said this tour was going to be different as Scotland had really good players who had been performing well and would be involved. He got us to watch the 1997 living with Lions video which we loved. That was the first time I'd heard of Doddie Weir. I remember thinking how sad it was when he got injured and had to cut his tour short. Then the 2017 lions were announced and once again there were hardly any Scots! Having seen that I checked out some videos online of Scotland back then and Doddie Weir in particular - Bill MacLaren's commentary of him is brilliant."

"Shortly after that, he went public with his diagnosis of MND. Having a rugby tour cut short suddenly didn't seem quite so sad. Everything Doddie has done since then has been so cool. Setting up the Foundation which helps so many others and his whole attitude has been magic. I watched the documentary about him a while back and it seems the same could be said about his wife and family. After the pandemic lockdown had been going for a while I found myself wondering how he'd be getting on. I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help and I came up with the idea of playing a tune a day for 50 days on my pipes. It's been a fun thing to do and raised a wee bit of money for the Foundation. I hope all the Weir family are doing OK in lockdown."

If you want to support Archie's efforts, please visit his JustGiving page.