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There were just too many fantastic moments to count during the final Festival Club spree of Celtic Connections 2012 - at least until we’ve had some sleep and reintroduced ourselves to green vegetables – so what follows are our blearily/hastily/painstakingly edited highlights.

First honours must go to three musicians who honestly didn’t envisage being there at all until very late in the day. Miss Jeana Leslie, a fiddler and singer of Orkney renown, started Sunday in Germany, after playing in five different countries over the preceding four days, and though she’d previously thought herself resigned to missing the last night, come afternoon she faced the fact that she that she just had to be there, and headed for the nearest airport. At the ticket desk, though, no matter what route she was willing to travel by – via Dublin was checked out as one possibility – there were no flights available that would get her here in time. Just as all seemed lost, however, she overheard a flight to Glasgow being called: it turned out to be a private oil-workers charter, which categorically did not take extra passengers, but by sheer, shamelessly determined dint of begging, sobbing, offering to wear oilskins and ultimately just refusing to go away, Jeana was on that plane and in the club by midnight. You go, girl.

Fiddler Aidan O’Rourke and piper Allan MacDonald actually tried very hard to leave Glasgow on Sunday afternoon, having excelled themselves on all fronts the previous night, and kidded themselves that enough was enough. Each having set off separately from their respective hotels, they got as far as Queen Street station, single tickets to Edinburgh already purchased, before they caught sight of each other. Their eyes met and held across a crowded concourse, realisation dawned that they were in the grip of something bigger than the both of them; each simultaneously shook his head, turned round, and trudged back the way they came.

And thus it was, by such and other means, that come 3am in Apollo 23 the crowd and the mood was like a handcrafted blend of Celtic Connections’ purest distillation and its dirtiest dregs – if you were there, we’ll leave it to you to pick. Findlay Napier – having just shut up shop along at the Late Night Sessions – took the stage in triumph with his Bar Room Mountaineers, sounding utterly glorious, and rarely has the line in their best-known song, ‘George’ about “babbling and crazed” seemed more happily pertinent than to their audience at that moment, as Admiral Fallow’s Louis Abbott bounced about at the front, whirling his shirt around his head, while someone else brandished an inflatable shark.

After a few numbers, our very own Festival Club host with the most, Kevin Macleod, joined the band for a rousing rendition of ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’. There then ensued a stage invasion by about 35 musicians, who collectively took us home with ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ – the last by way of a final encore (or so Kevin thought), on the basis of our assurance, in answer to his Singing Kettle question, that we had indeed been “good boys and girls”. Kevin then did the last farewells and thank-yous (during which we’re sure we heard him refer to Findlay Napier as a “sex puffin”, though our ears may have been at fault), told us he’d see us in “49½ weeks” and turned to leave the stage - but was arrested in his progress by the sound engineer over the PA, demanding “One more tune”: duly delivered in a riotous set of jigs.

As we slowly filed out, one young man, wearing a purple paper crown, was overheard patiently consoling a sobbing young woman: “It’s over. It’s over. Just accept it.” A somewhat more surreal parting shot came from a local gentleman of distinguished years, who we suspect had wandered into the club from the United Clyde Shipbuilders’ 40th anniversary show at the Fruitmarket earlier on, and had clearly been blown away by what he’d witnessed. “I’d better get going,” he said. “I’ve left a Muslim in charge of my laptop case. It’s no big deal, though – all it’s full of is Scott’s of Bellshill pies.” We would dearly love to know the full story behind this gnomic utterance, but suspect we never will.

And as a final consoling thought, as we attempt to contemplate normal life again: anyone frequenting the Sainsbury’s near the Concert Hall of late (we at the blog bunker have rarely dined anywhere else) will have been collecting the Scotrail vouchers they’re handing out at the checkouts, offering a return trip anywhere in Scotland for just £19. They’re valid until the end of March – in other words, the ideal way to get to Celtic Connections’ Big Top in Skye on the 23rd and 24th of that month, the climax of the year-long Scotland’s Islands promotion, featuring Rosanne Cash, The Civil Wars, the Michael McGoldrick Band, Aoife O’Donovan (of Crooked Still fame), Dàimh, The Deadly Gentlemen and Mànran. We’ll see you there.