h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am.

We already have. Steamed puddin', neeps and tatties (flavoured with double cream, butter, chives and nutmeg) and we piped it in with a jazz piano rendition of Scotland The Brave (given as how I don't play the bagpipes).

Sadly, there's no whisky in the hoose.

B

I'm just having my third hunk o' haggis of the day: breakfast just straight up, lunch baked in a calzone, dinner with Moroccan veggies and a dram of Glen Ord (single malt from the Black Isle, the home of the sadly defunct Ferintosh, Mr. Burns' favourite).

As a Scottish person, I may have to enquire about the authenticity of a haggis calzone...

Marvellous sounding idea though.

The Italian Master of the Calzone Emporium was quite taken by the haggis calzone.


Here in Canada there is now a bit of a tradition (begun in Vancouver by a man named McWong) of combining Burns Day and Chinese New Year into Gung Haggis Fat Choy. It's been a few years since my Hong Kong born neighbour and I collaborated on a little version of it (I included some seal flipper pie to make it authentically Canadian).

I think I suggested elsewhere that with a bit of soya sauce for dipping, the haggis calzone would make for a nice Gung Haggis Fat Ciao, Bella!

about that Canadian tradition: http://www.gunghaggis.com/

Nope. Burn's day is long over here in any case.

I've only ever heard of men celebrating it.

They just said on the radio that it's Australia Day. I think I'm more into that.

I usually do - hubby's fond of haggis (we have it throughout the year, not only on Burns Night - leftover haggis stuffed into portabello mushrooms with a few pine nuts is the dish he was fantasising about when stuck in the African bush)

He's in hospital at the mo, so we'll probabaly have that when he gets out. I did manage to find some whisky to raise a toast, though.

Plus its a big celebration amongst my Scottish country dancing friends - there's a dance complete with supper and music and poetry this Saturday that I have a ticket for, and I'm on the demonstration team who are scheduled to perform at a Burns Supper next Saturday.

And it's traditional to have a toast to the lassies - I've never come across it being a men-only thing

Her indoors is half-Scottish, apparently (strange, in that both her parents are Mancs). So I made her try haggis for tea last night.

She's not a fan.

I agree with Effers, it tends to be a very blokey thing. What could be more patronizingly blokey than a toast to the lassies?

The toast to the laddies that follows it isn't patronising, I take it?

This is what winds me up about This Place sometimes. Someone mentions a tradition that loads of people enjoy, and it's instantly dismissed by people who've never experienced it as being patronising.

I'm glad I've not told my Scottish cousins about this place. They're girls, and they'd feel patronised at having their traditions decried by people who don't know what it feels like to be part of them.

Yes I'd like to hear from Effers and Anhaga what Burns celebrations they have experienced, and what was it about them that seemed so blokey? Genuinely, I'm interested to learn!

"I'd like to hear from Effers and Anhaga what Burns celebrations they have experienced"

Well, I did start the thread and I have mentioned a few of my experiences of the event, including hosting it.

This has just popped up in my Twitter feed - a letter from Burns to a critic:

Ellisland, 1791.

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.

That told him...

Yes you did, and I didn't see anything in it which was particulalry male-centric or chauvinistic. So presumably you have other experiences from previous years, maybe?

"The toast to the laddies that follows it isn't patronising, I take it?"


In my experience there is no toast to the laddies. There is a "response to the toast to the lassies."



Seriously, Burns Dinners have very often been male only things. That's simply history.


And it's blokey.


Look at this, for goodness sake: "Formal dinners are hosted by organisations such as Burns clubs, the Freemasons or St Andrews Societies and occasionally end with dancing when ladies are present."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burns_supper


"occasionally . . . when ladies are present"



Maybe my perception is coloured by all those hours spent with a Scottish-born Burns specialist tutor in grad school. There's no one more blokey than he was.

Thanks - it obviously does vary from place to place, and down the years.

"it obviously does vary from place to place, and down the years"


Of course.


But it has tended to be blokey from the beginning.


When and where people have been willing to admit the blokeyness, it has become a little less blokey, with changes to the toast to the ladies, and invitations to the ladies to share the dinner rather than just prepare it.

But, even when I've hosted the Dinner in my own home, I've felt, despite my own efforts, that the whole thing really was a guys' thing. I appreciate the poetry and love the food, but the ritual is tiresomely old boys club.