It is a night when people across the globe come together to celebrate Scotland’s national bard. Burns Night usually involves large gatherings filled with poetry, song and – of course – haggis. However, this year the laddies and the lassies will be forced to mark the occasion in a much more subdued manner. As with almost everything over the last year, the Coronavirus crisis has forced the celebration online, with the Scottish Government calling for Scots to celebrate ‘Burns Night In’ on January 25. To mark the digital occasion, the University of Glasgow is asking Burns Clubs and Scots around the world to share photos and details of how they are marking the day, using the hashtag #VirtualBurnsNight.
By Hamish MacPherson
Back in the Day I have long considered it a national disgrace that we do not do more to promote Robert Burns as Scotland’s gift to the world REGULAR readers may recall that I asked for people to email me about local history and heritage projects, and already I have a backlog, though please keep sending them to the above address. The latest in this occasional series is a local project with national implications, for in this case it involves one of the homes of our National Bard, Robert Burns. I have long considered it a national disgrace that we do not do more to promote Robert Burns as Scotland’s gift to the world. Given his connections to places across the country, it mystifies me why there is no nationally co-ordinated trail that would take you from his birthplace of Alloway in Ayrshire to his mausoleum in Dumfries via the many locations attached to Burns.
ONCE you are reminded of the late William McIlvanney, it’s hard not to start missing him, his writing, his coolness. We had news this week of Ian Rankin being entrusted to work up some of Willie’s literary notes, found in his papers. These are sketches towards an early 1970s prequel for his ground-breaking crime novel, Laidlaw, which Rankin – an avowed McIlvanney devotee – has turned into a fully realised work. “I would find myself waking up in the middle of the night with a line that felt like a Willie line and I would scribble it down,” says Rankin. As I’ve been sampling McIlvanney’s corpus in the last few days (“Corpus! Just don’t make a corpse of me in the process,” I can imagine him snapping), this seems a particularly appropriate method.