It sure beats Blunt Trauma Night, anyway.
Raise a glass of your favourite industrial solvent to the immortal memory of Scotland’s sodden-drunk poster-boy for good career planning — don’t farm rocky, marginal land if you’re more apt to compose poetry about whatever the plough turns over, don’t consider being a slave overseer in Jamaica, and — whatever you do — don’t be an exciseman if you have a failing for the hard stuff.
Both my parents’ families come from the same part of Ayrshire and the Stewartry that Burns knocked around. We’ve got a family story that an ancestor was once his schoolteacher. We’ve been able to prove that about as much as our theory that we’re descended from Scipio Kennedy, a West African slave belonging to the Cassilis family.
Oh, and you don’t want to know what’s in haggis. It’s truly offal.