Here’s mud in your eye, with a toast to the immortal memory of Rabbie Burns

Clearing papers on my desk I came across the Craigie column of Wednesday, September 2 2020 with contributions from readers about annoying words and phrases, which I’d intended responding to at the time.

Puddle was a word that exasperated one reader, especially when used by football writers and pundits. Could they not use the word “dub”? Why not indeed – it’s a fine old Scots word. The reader had been able to find only one definition of it – a pool of water – in Chambers Scots Dictionary.

It’s probably sacrilege to Courier readers but I have no interest in football, the oval ball being my pursuit, but I’d have directed him – or it might have been her – to Dr Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language which confirms Mr Chambers’ definition.

“Running dubs and gutters” was what my father called it when the land was saturated after endless days of rain such as we experienced earlier in the month. The ground didn’t get a chance to dry out and until the frosts came there was standing water – dubs – in the fields and on the woodland paths.

And gutters are mud. There’s no answer to the Doyenne’s disapproving looks as Inka and I trail gutters through the house when we get home from walks. Explaining that it’s all part of the joys of country living falls on deaf ears.

Interestingly, the next entry in Dr Jamieson is dub-skelper which is an expression used contemptuously for a rambling fellow. And perhaps I’m beginning to ramble myself.

Monday coming, January 25, is normally a red-letter day for Scots, when Rabbie Burns’ birthday is celebrated at Burns Suppers the world over – when “drouthy neibors, neibors meet”. Countless libations of the Auld Kirk would normally be drunk, celebrating the life of the Ploughman Poet from Ayrshire whose lasting legacy was to show the world that nobility of the soul was not limited to any single rank in life.

The Doyenne and I had our tickets booked for the annual Tarfside WRI Burns Supper, a notable event in the social calendar of Glenesk.

An expectant company sits down in Tarfside Masonic Hall which is bursting at the seams. The president calls the company to order and says the Selkirk Grace – “Some hae meat an’ canna eat…”. A haggis made by one of the ladies of the rural institute with venison hearts and livers provided by the estate stalkers, and chappit neeps and tatties from the glen farmers, is piped in.

The Bard’s famous Address to a Haggis is recited, the haggis is sliced from end to end

– gralloched, you might say – with a keenbladed sgean dhu and its “gushing entrails” spill out “warm-reekin, rich”.

A dozen more homemade haggises appear as if by magic. They are all made to the same traditional glen recipe but each has a different taste – which just shows how individuality rules in the glen kitchens.

Everyone gets a spoonfu’ of four or five of the blessed creations. There’s no standing on ceremony and everyone sets to with a will… “Till all their weel-swall’d kytes belyve/are bent like drums.” – till byand-by all their well-filled bellies are bent like drums.

You’d think that would be enough for the evening, but the glen ladies don’t let you off that easily. The haggis is quickly followed by the equally traditional sweet of clootie dumpling – a fruit dumpling with raisins and currants boiled in a cloot, or cloth. By the end of the meal a’body is stappit.

The principal toast at these evenings is

to the poet’s Immortal Memory, a tribute to Burns’ life and poetry. Then the Toast to the Lasses, for Burns is known to have had a roving eye for a bonny lassie. And last, the Reply to the Lasses – each saluted with a generous gude-willie waught of the Cratur.

The evening ends, as so many evenings in the glen do, with a dance to give everyone the chance to work off their supper on the dancefloor.

How many travellers driving on the northbound carriageway of the A90, just past the finger post to the intriguingly named Temple of Fiddes (on the approach to Stonehaven) notice, let alone know the significance of, the memorial cairn in a lay-by? It commemorates William Burnes (note the spelling), father of Scotland’s national poet, who left the nearby croft of Clochnahill for Edinburgh and then Ayrshire.

This year, for only the second time in living memory, the Tarfside WRI Burns

Supper has been cancelled, not because of weather, which is bad enough, but because of a virus which would have been meaningless to Burns. He could pen the poem To a Louse which has the timeless lines “O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oorsels as ithers see us…” written after the poet watched a louse crawling up the hat of the lady sitting in the pew in front of him in church.

For once he’d have been lost for words to bring life to an invisible organism.

Till all their well-filled bellies are bent like drums

MARKER: The memorial cairn overlooking Clochnahill, which was farmed by Robert Burns’ father William. Picture by Angus Whitson.