Burns' Night

I'm going to a Burns' Night tomorrow with Simon. We will both be scrubbed up nice, Si has been practicing tying a real bow tie and can do it now confidently but only around his leg because that is how he has been practicing. I can just about tie a real bow tie and there is a ready made one in reserve just in case so we are not panicking.

There will be reciting of Burns' poems, toasts to the haggis, to the lassies and the lassies' reply. Gordon on Informationally Overloaded has a good description of the general sort of events. It will be fun, however I have another confession to make, that will upset Gordon even more than my confession that I hate haggis. I'm not too fond of Robert Burns' poetry either.

As I've said before I went to primary school in Edinburgh, there, each year, I had to learn a Burns poem to recite in the Burns poetry competition held in the school where points would be given for remembering the poem, pronunciation and putting-the-poem-overness.

I was doomed.

I have never had a Scottish accent and I can't roll my R's and can't do accents. It filled me with a loathing for "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beasties" and all his other poems. In the end I wouldn't bother trying to learn the poem and when it was my turn to recite in the first round I would half arsedly say what I had learnt in a piping English accent with the happy result of being knocked out straight away.

So I don't like Haggis and I don't like Rabbie Burns, why am I going you ask? Well I do like whisky, the dancing, the local(ish) marching pipes and drums. I did spend my formative years in Scotland so even if I wasn't born there I do feel kinda Scottish sometimes (mostly when we are getting trounced by the Italians) but most of all because well it's a fun night out and there will be an open bottle of whisky on the table .