Initial Conditions

Last night I went to a Burns supper at my church. Having been in Scotland for five and a half years now, I guessed it was about time to enjoy this celebration of Scottish culture, celebrated by Scots, faux-Scots and sort-of-Scots worldwide.

I have to say it was very enjoyable. The haggis was piped in to Scotland the Brave and the Address to a Haggis followed. Luckily I’d heard this before, so I was able to follow it and loved the way the guy recited it, his enthusiasm was infectious and it was impossible to not be smiling when it ended. After the Haggis, Neaps and Tatties (herein referred to as HNT) some of the kids in the church gave some well-memorised and wonderful recitations of To a Mouse and Listen to the teacher (not poems I am especially familiar with and which I didn’t entirely understand) .

There followed a ceilidh, which I couldn’t stay for, so my Burns night ended early. But I enjoyed very much what had experienced.

I had learnt a lot about Burns himself that night and was astonished to see that he died at 37, after living a life in which, according to one of the kids, he had had “many woman friends and lots of children”, presumably one of which was The lovely lass o’ Inverness which had been read out. Anyway that’s not my point.

No, when I was there I realised that this wasn’t really a celebration of a poet, but of Scottishness itself. You could tell that all the Scottish people there were so proud of their nationality, and it was all in a positive way, not in a “we’re not english” kind of way. It’s easy to see why so many English people pretend to be Scottish, because in England there’s no real celebration of Englishness (noone eats roast beef because of Shakespeare’s birthday, for example. But then Shakespeare never addressed a cow). Northern Ireland is scarce in such celebrations as well (it disappoints me that St Patrick’s Day is largely ignored in many parts, but I kind of understand the reasons for it), and “Seamus Heaney suppers” might take a century or two to take off.

So my point is that I am deeply jealous of those of you who grew up in Scotland and learnt Burns, because in doing so you are bound together in ways that Shakespeare can never do to any miserable GCSE students.

Having reviewed this post, it made very little sense. Still I hope it vaguely entertained…