Burns Night

Aside from the fact that I couldna hardly understand a word said by any of the speakers, it was a reet braw neet t’be oot.

Our Burns Supper was held at a local hall. Over a hundred people attended to celebrate the life and times of Scotland’s poet hero, Robert Burns. My expectation of a formal evening, laden with pomp, ceremony, tradition, bagpipes, haggis and endless readings of Burns’ poems although fulfilled, was also not quite as I had imagined.

Jeanette told me I should wear something tartan so in the morning I went into Pitlochry and purchased tartan tights for both us. Whilst I was in the shop, I could hear the strains of a bagpiper in the street outside. How charming, I thought, setting the scene for Burns Night.

“Oh no, not again,” groaned the shop assistant, “he’s been at it all day. I canna stand the sound.”

That evening,  as Gordon was playing the fiddle at the supper, he left early to rehearse and bag us good seats.  Jeanette and I were dressing up in our tartan tights, when he phoned in a panic.

“I don’t think there’s a bar here,” Gordon said. “You better bring something.”

 A teetotal Burns Supper in a cold village hall on a frosty night did not bear contemplation so we found a few bottles of wine and some whisky to pour over our haggis, and set out.

As it turned out there was a bar after all which was serving the cheapest drinks in the whole of Perthshire so we kept our hooch hidden in our handbags. The quality of the wines was a bit dubious and our gin and tonic was served in wee plastic cups smaller than the wee plastic wine glasses. No ice but a choice of lemon or lime.

Drinks sorted, we squeezed onto our table and proceedings began much as I had expected. The Selkirk Grace was said:

Some hae meat and canna eat

And some wad eat that want it,

Nut we hae meat and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.

We were served cock-a-leekie soup out of a huge tureen and then the haggis was piped in by a young bagpiper, Sandy Horne (truly!) followed by a farmer in his kilt, holding the rather unprepossessing-looking haggis up high on a silver platter.

With great solemnity and a large amount of messianic fervour, the address to the haggis was given by a large Scotsman. It is a rather long poem, so I will just give you verse one:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, 
Great chieftain o the puddin'-race! 
Aboon them a' ye tak your place, 
Painch, tripe, or thairm: 
Weel are ye wordy of a grace 
As lang's my arm.

This was just the start of several poetry renditions, none of which I could fathom at all, but all were performed with great theatricality and often in the dark with the giver holding a candle. I know not why.

We tucked into our haggis, neeps and tatties followed by oatcakes and cheese, a traditional bill o’fare finished off with tea and shortbread.

Now it was time for the Immortal Memory. I prepared myself for more poetry readings and hoped they would not ramble on for too long as it is rather hard to remain focussed when listening to a foreign language one does not speak.

In this I was wrong. A local livestock auctioneer was giving the Immortal Memory. He had a delightfully eccentric way of speaking and rubbing his balding head as if he was bemused to find himself asked to entertain us. He set the tone for the rest of the evening, that was for sure, with stories such as this (translated into English by yours truly):

“A marine was sent to a vairy remote part of the Shetland Isles to guard a rare snowy owl that had been found there.

“He’d been there for a month and not seen another living soul when one night there was a loud banging on his door and a huge hairy man with a wild beard was standing in his doorway.

“’I’ve walked eight miles,’ he said, ‘to invite you to a Burns Supper. Do you fight?’

‘’’Oh aye,” said the marine, ‘I’ve seen plenty of fighting.’

“’Do ye drink whisky?’

“’Oh aye,” said the marine who after four weeks on the island was ready for a wee dram.

“Do you want sex?’

“The marine thought of his wife who he had not seen for months and said yes, he could do with a bit of that.

“As the large hairy man went to leave, the marine stopped him to ask: ‘how should I dress?”

“’Doesnay matter,’ said the man, ‘it will just be you and me.’”

The evening rattled on in this vein, with the stories and jokes told in broad dialect becoming harder for a sassenach like me to understand - but the local farmers, who largely made up the assembled throng, were having no such difficulty and they roared their approval. Each speaker was a man, and each held before him a progressively larger beer belly than the previous fella, until at last a local woman stood to give the Reply to the Lassies. If we were hoping for a less sexist tone to now balance the male pub humour, we were out of luck.

“Why are middle-aged women fatter than single women?” she asked, rhetorically.

“Single women come home, look at what’s in the fridge, and go to bed.

“Married women come home, look at what’s in the bed, and go to the fridge.”

Finally Billy got up to sing a song – boasting the largest beer belly of all – but an equally large voice to match. Then Gordon fiddled a few selections and we ended the evening with a rendition of Burns’ most famous rhyme of all, Auld Lang Syne – and even I knew the words to that one.