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It being Thursday - and thus a full week into Celtic Connections 2012 - Apollo 23 reopens its portals tonight as the Festival Club, beckoning you in to another dimension of experience altogether. The scarily small three-way radius between there, the Concert Hall and the Holiday Inn positively invites comparisons with the notorious Bermuda Triangle – both being hotspots for major glitches in the time/space continuum, where time, objects and people mysteriously vanish and reappear in unexpected places. In the club, these temporal irregularities and elasticities frequently result in exchanges like this: “Hiya! How’re you doing? Long time no see.” “No it’s not: I had a long conversation with you last night. And the night before.” It also gets to the point where you’ll be talking about last night, when in fact you actually mean yesterday morning. (Think about it.) The intermittent mobile signal in Apollo 23 doesn’t help matters either, what with texts often taking a couple of hours to transmit, and neither does the fact that all four faces of ‘sculptor’ George Wyllie’s running-legged clock outside the bus station are permanently stuck at midnight.

This particular Thursday, it’s also the official first day of Showcase Scotland 2012 – although nowadays most of the sellout 180-strong delegates’ listare so keen they arrive as ‘early birds’ on the Wednesday. This year, as well as our international Showcase partners from Catalonia, we welcome representatives from 21 different countries, including Australia, India, the Middle East and Shetland – the last of whom (as ever) were particularly impatient to get here, and suffered a particularly tortuous journey, involving delays, a flight amalgamation between Sumburgh and Glasgow, and eventually a slow bus from Aberdeen, with every step of their all-too-slow progress charted via increasingly narky Facebook updates.

There was a somewhat priceless Freudian slip in the course of an afternoon Showcase Scotland seminar, ‘Behind the Scenes at Celtic Connections’, when Donald Shaw, discussing the symbiosis between the festival’s development and that of its Scottish artists – taking the Treacherous Orchestra as an example – summed up: “So basically, the Treacherous Orchestra are a living indictment of what Celtic Connections is all about.” At which point the panel’s facilitator interjected, “You mean endorsement…”

Of all the presumably thousands of Burns Suppers taking place last night – and even counting Celtic Connections’ own slap-up Alternative Burns Night with Babelfish at the Orán Mòr – surely the top once-in-a-lifetime experience came during ex-Cream singer and bassist Jack Bruce’s stunning Old Fruitmarket gig with Lau, Jim Sutherland, Mr McFall’s Chamber and his own three-man band, when the full line-up performed ‘Ca’ the Yows’, followed by ‘Aye Waukin’ O’. It likely isn’t often that Rabbie finds his songs in company with trip-out classics like ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, but one suspects he would approve.