I'll be at a big charity Burns supper in Glasgow on Saturday night. I'll be joining various, mostly young, actors and singers who have been working hard on Burns-related sketches and responses penned for them by all the contemporary writers they could cajole. I'll have the real pleasure of performing the first poem I learned by heart when I was about 10 – Burns's To a Mouse, On Turning Her up in Her Nest With the Plough, November 1785, a poem which, like any great poem, continues to both further delight and to mean different, deeper things to me as I grow older – and then my actor friend Frances will chip in with a daft doggerel response of mine, From a Mouse. (Parody and doggerel and facetiousness are big features of Burns suppers. Part of the fun? Sometimes …)
If we follow the form, naturally there'll be the ritual feast, the haggis piped in, addressed, sacrificed and served, the traditional speeches, the Address to the Lassies, the Reply, the Immortal Memory, which is supposed to skip the facetiousness and meditate on some aspect of the poet's life and his work. (That life story is heartbreaking. His own personal poetic muse – except for Tam O'Shanter, that late, great, gift, his masterpiece – well, she more or less deserted him in his late 20s. In deep poverty, with broken health, he devoted his last decade before his death at the age of 37 to collecting hundreds of folk tunes on his fiddle – writing new lyrics that'll stop your heart with their tenderness, or have you weeping with laughter at their bawdiness. There'll be whisky. I can't guarantee the evening will be devoid of chauvinism or sentimentality.
The saving grace? The real meat and drink will be, of course, the poetry and the songs of Robert Burns. There'll be the poems – such energy, such dazzling brilliance, such vigorous living language, this poetry performs itself, still demands to be heard aloud. There'll be, please, plenty of those songs. Despite the possibility of it being longer than the Military Tattoo, despite Hugh MacDiarmid being spot on when he said, "Mair nonsense has been uttered in his name than in ony's barrin liberty and Christ", it still feels right to be at a Burns supper on Burns Night.
To us Scots he's "Oor Rabbie, your Rabbie, a'body's Rabbie"… Not just a poet, a myth. Burns is, according to the poet Edwin Muir, "to the respectable, a decent man; to the Rabelaisian, bawdy; to the sentimentalist, sentimental; to the socialist, a revolutionary; to the nationalist, a patriot; to the religious, pious …" So no doubt, this January at the start of referendum year, even diehard unionists will be searching around for words of his that seem to support their position and, where they can extrapolate them, sprinkling them around with abandon to salt their haggis, neeps and tatties at Burns suppers the length and breadth of the land.
True, Burns did – with great conviction – inhabit many apparently contradictory personae (he excelled in the dramatic monologue after all, was a master of irony). But – though I am heartily sick of the ubiquitous, daft "if Burns was alive today how would he vote?" question – my gut feeling is that (och, just read him!) as a libertarian, a democrat, a lover of freedom and autonomy, a revolutionary and a romantic, of course he'd be voting for independence.
Why not? After all, just about every contemporary writer or artist, young and old, that I know has declared they'll be saying a big yes to "Should Scotland be an independent country?" By no means all of us are SNP members – I'm not – but there is a very powerful drive towards cultural and political autonomy. A desire to grow up and take responsibility for ourselves. You can feel it in the air. It's coming yet for aw that … If not this time, then, nevertheless, it feels like an inexorable process has begun.
