Burns Night

The Tidal Times had made the declaration a month ahead that there would be a Grand Burns Night celebration at the community hall, “in memory of the Bard of Ayrshire, and everything Scottish.”

Silas Cotswold himself had designed the front page, which was replete with thistles, lions, and a blue-on-white St. Andrew’s cross—a saltire—in each top corner. The page had been reproduced on posters that Silas hung around the community, most of which had been removed by unknown hands as soon as they were fastened up. Silas denounced the vandals in a half-page editorial and said the guilty would get their comeuppance.

The Bell-Atkinson geeks, who were the vandals, carried a smug look. They had recently returned from a two-week trip to Great Britain and had seen some old posters exhorting the citizenry to “Keep Britain Tidy,” which they had removed in their belief that the posters themselves were anything but tidy—as were, they decided, Silas’s Burns Night posters.

The night started with Sheila Martin delivering Burns’s “Address to the Haggis,” the words of which, for anyone not raised five hundred miles north of Carlisle, are largely incomprehensible. The chief reason the audience stayed with her to the last line—“But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer, Gie her a haggis”—was that many of them had gone through her English classes at the high school and remained acutely aware of the consequences of inattention.

Silas next read from the program. “And now an open mic performance on a Scottish theme. Volunteers … anyone?”

Samson Spinner muttered, “Ah, Christ,” as Finbar O’Toole rushed to the stage and unfolded a printed sheet before grasping the microphone.

“A limerick,” Finbar said. “An original one,” and launched into:

“There was a young lass frae Dundee
Who desperately needed a pee.
She stopped at the vicar’s …”

Julie Clements raised her eyebrows at Alun and Jillian, but the kids ignored her and, along with the three O’Toole siblings, joyfully assisted with the rest of it:

“Then lowered her knickers,
And said, ‘Just pretend you don’t see!’”

Sheila Martin, trying and failing to make a stern face, told Julie, her daughter, “You have to keep them away from that O’Toole house.”

“Shut up, Mom!” Julie snapped.

Always ready with a line from the actual Bard, Sheila replied, “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth …”

Alun won a coin toss with Jillian for who should do the thistle piece. He jumped onstage and took the microphone.

“The thistle,” he declared. “Would you like to hear about the Scottish thistle?”

He carried on, undaunted by the silence. “The thistle you might think is just an old prickly pointy thing. But that’s the point.” He paused, grinned. “Point, get it?” And after a further void, “Anyway, the prickles came in useful way back when some attackers were creeping up on Scottish soldiers who were sleeping. The enemy took their shoes off so the Scots wouldn’t hear them—but they stepped on thistles, and that was them done for. The Scots jumped out of bed and killed them. I think they were English,” he added. “And they haven’t been back since.”

At this point a side door crashed open and Scott McConville, the Inlet’s veterinarian, marched in holding aloft a platter with what purported to be the evening’s pièce de résistance, a haggis, though this steaming, amorphous lump bore little resemblance to the real thing, mostly because Scott had dumped the ingredients into a bowl shaped to create Christmas plum puddings. Scott claimed Highland blood back to Robert the Bruce. Rachel Spinner, skilled genealogist, had been tempted to press him for details but decided to let sleeping dogs lie, given that Scott was caregiver to her kennel of beloved Irish setters.

Jillian asked, “What’s actually in a haggis?” Samson explained, “You take a sheep’s stomach, stuff it with its heart, lungs, liver, and whatnots like oatmeal and salt, and cook it. It’s a bit like a meat loaf, but basically, it’s boiled guts–offal.”

Jillian performed the gagging thing with her forefinger, and sound effects.

It is traditional at Robbie Burns nights for the haggis to be piped in, but invitations to the Greater Victoria Police Pipe Band, the Vancouver Firefighters Pipes and Drums, and the internationally famous Simon Fraser University Pipe Band had all been graciously declined.

“They have a reputation to protect, after all,” opined Annabelle Bell-Atkinson, whose offer to cook the haggis had been also graciously declined by Cotswold, who believed she got her name in the paper enough as it was.

Instead of a pipe band, Scott was led in by RCMP Constable Sammy Quan from the Salt Spring detachment playing “Scotland the Brave” on his bugle, freshly polished for the occasion and decorated with a tartan tassel. Sammy said that was the McQuan plaid of a branch of the family that had its roots in a Hong Kong-based quartermaster sergeant-major of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, who had passed through the crown colony at some point.

Annabelle Bell-Atkinson took to the stage and, with a signal to the geeks who started hammering on the piano, she roared into the “Skye Boat Song”: “Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, Onward! the sailors cry …” She followed with a lecture about Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobites and their defeat at the hands of the despicable Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Culloden, in which she managed to suggest that early Bell-Atkinsons were involved, though she failed to clarify which side they supported.

Sheila Martin remarked that Annabelle’s affection for her two corgis suggested a strong affiliation for the establishment, so her family probably did not support the Young Pretender.

A voice from the back corner of the hall announced, “Scottish dancing!” In no time the place was awhirl with flying kilts and bouncing sporrans, exposing sets of knees and other items that would have been better left covered.

Randolph Champion’s sudden contribution was to shout, “Sword dancing,” and start to wave around a claymore he had ordered from Amazon for the occasion. The thing was five feet long and weighed about five pounds, in US measures, and, given Randolph’s condition courtesy of the early and short-lived free bar, could have caused decapitations. However, Constable Ravina Sidhu jumped in, handcuffed him, and stuck him in a corner with a warning to “Stay!”

The microphone crackled, and on the stage Hyacinth Jakes demanded attention. She announced that residents at the seniors complex had been rehearsing “the Scottish play” and were about to present some selections, if everybody would pay attention.

Someone asked where the other two witches were.

Hyacinth said she would portray Lady Macbeth. “Who, as you will know, was sleepwalking, and declaims, ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!’” She stopped, looked down at her hand, and sputtered, “Out, goddammit!”

Her recent swain, Willard Starling, rushed onstage to cover for her, but the retired heavy equipment operator became confused as he spread out his hands. “Is this a digger I see before me?”

There was noise from a corner where Erik Karlsson was arguing that the haggis had been actually first created by Vikings on their way to invade Britain and in need of sustenance for the long journey in their longboats. “They brought sheep with them just for that,” he explained. “They knew that the sheep’s stomach would be the perfect container and …”

Jillian shouted, “Hey, look,” and pointed to where the haggis, apparently forgotten, had fallen from its platter due to the dancing’s reverberations, rolled under the piano stool, and was being attended to by the aforementioned corgis.

“Good dogs,” Samson muttered.

The evening was beginning to deteriorate and could have gone in any direction until the youth factor stepped in, in the form of Connie Wilson, Charlie’s daughter, who had just received word that her application for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City had been accepted for the fall. Her singing especially had convinced the audition judges.

Connie took the microphone and began, a cappella,

“O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June …”

Charlie was beaming with pride as the crowd began humming along. But when she reached the final verse,

“And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel, awhile! …”

he noticed that she was gazing in a particular direction. He followed the look and found himself staring at the adoring eyes of Liam O’Toole, Finbar’s oldest and of an age with Connie. Finbar also made the connection. To Charlie’s dismay, he winked at him and gave a thumbs-up.

With alarming thoughts of such future nuptials in his head, Charlie decided then and there that Connie was going to New York, no matter what, and wondered if perhaps there might be an earlier, spring semester.

The day after the event, Silas Cotswold offered fifty percent off annual subscriptions (fifty dollars) to The Tidal Times for anyone joining The Tidal Times Spinner’s Inlet Robbie Burns Society by the end of the month. Membership in the society was recently set at a hundred dollars per annum.