Burns Night

By the time you read this, it will be the day after Burns' night. I will be celebrating this, along with a good number of my fellow Brits, in the traditional way of drinking whisky and forgetting that I'm not Scottish.

I work with a lot of non-Brits. Explaining the concept turns out to problematic.

“It's the night we celebrate the death of Robert Burns,” I told them.

“Wow, you guys must really hate Scottish poets,” they said. 

I tried again.

“We're not celebrating the fact that he's dead. We're celebrating that fact that he was alive in the first place.”

“How do you do that?” they asked.

“We read a poem to a haggis.”

They gave me a look that suggested serenading plates of meat was not a common pastime back home.

“It's tradition,” I said grumpily. “It happens because it does.”

In reality, it happens because, when Burns died, a bunch of friends held a dinner to grieve, and to honour him, and the commemorate his memory. And then they did it again the next year, and then the year after that, after which it did, indeed, become tradition. I guess that's how everything starts. People finding things that work and then repeating them until the origins, and originators, are lost in the fog of time.

In fact, this year I will be celebrating twice. Tonight, the Saturday before Burn's night, Sue and I are travelling down to Surbiton to celebrate the death of a Scottish poet, whose work we don't know very well, with a bunch of strangers, who we've never met, in the house of a couple we sat next to in a restaurant once and got on quite well with, but haven't really been in contact with since. As a result of this confluence of circumstances, and a recent exchange of excited emails, we are now heading down to spend a, hopefully, pleasant evening with them, eating haggis and drinking whisky. Sue is a vegetarian who dislikes even the smell of the 'golden malt'. What could go wrong?

I must admit, we spent some time humming and hahing over the invitation. We are, after all, British, and spontaneity doesn't come easy. Excuses flowed aplenty. We had no-one to look after the children, we wouldn't have time due to other commitments, it's a long drive and we'd have to find a hotel for the night, and most tellingly of all, we convinced ourselves that the invitation had been made in haste and in the expectation that we would politely decline.

So we said no. We sent a very nice email apologising for leaving it so long to reply, and saying that we were sure at this late stage they would already have confirmed numbers and we wouldn't want to be a burden.

We are, you may have guessed, quite English.

Our host, who is Scottish and therefore unencumbered with these issues of self-effacement and over-thinking, emailed back immediately to reassure us that we should not talk such nonsense, they would love to see us, and if there was any problem with numbers then they wouldn't have invited us.

So we are set to abandon the children with friends, drive down to Surrey and have a delightful evening.

Sometimes I think if there is a general condition of Englishness, it is in passing up opportunities for joy out of sheer embarrassment at the thought of being noticed. We worry that the very act of enjoying something makes it, by definition, something that we should not.

So it's nice, once in a while, to embrace our awkwardness, take a chance on something crazy, and spend some time talking to someone you don't know because, despite what you may think, the chances are you'll like it. And reaching out to another human being is probably what being alive is really about.

It's a grand experiment. I'll tell you whether it works in my next post.