Just tooling up for Burns Night, and reflecting on him and the Presidents Club
Our local pub always does a Burns Night, and we're going to it tomorrow with M's mum, despite my own feelings about Burns:
- as a lover: it was Silverwhistle who first put me on to his written boasts of his physical and emotional brutality to Jean Armour, Add to that, the crust of a man who could write 'Ae Fond Kiss' to a woman whose maid he had got pregnant while trying to seduce her, and who was confident he could 'please her' by writing a long string of insults about the destitute and once more pregnant-by-him Jean Armour....
- as a poet: I've just been introduced to AE Housman's assessment of him: “If you imagine a Scotch commercial traveller in a Scotch commercial hotel leaning on the bar and calling the barmaid ‘Dearie’ then you will know the keynote of Burns’s verse.” Hear hear, Alfred Edward!
- as a colleague: M was revolted, in his time at the Customs and Excise Museum, by the way Burns had sought preferment in the Excise by informing on other local excisemen who were 'stamping their rides'. Every local excise officer was allocated a 'ride', a fixed circuit of local businesses that he had to visit regularly to verify their output, calculate the duty payable, record the visit in his books and stamp the entry. A ride could be a very long distance, and when the weather was foul and the roads terrible there was a very strong temptation to decide that "Up in the morning’s no for me" and just stay indoors, write in some plausible figures for the whole ride and stamp it. Burns being Burns, I don't doubt he did that sometimes too. So did Tom Paine, who was sacked from the Excise for it in 1765 - but at least Paine (as far as we know) didn't shop his mates for it to curry favour with the bosses. So much for the Brotherhood of Man!
Altogether, Burns sounds like just the man who would have enjoyed nothing more than a night out with the Presidents Club, and I'm sure he would have been a big hit with them too.
Still, in a village community you can't be too fussy; M's mum wants to go, and M and I love a good haggis. At least there's one piece of good news - the usual piper, whose ghastly repertoire of 'professional Scotsman' jokes and stories we all know by heart by now, was already booked (probably doesn't like the current landlord any more than anybody else does) and the landlord has been obliged to engage a female piper. So there will be less sexist joshing, and if she takes it on herself to make jokes at all at least they will be different ones. (Might even be ever-so-slightly subversive: I'm quite intrigued. We'll see.)
- as a lover: it was Silverwhistle who first put me on to his written boasts of his physical and emotional brutality to Jean Armour, Add to that, the crust of a man who could write 'Ae Fond Kiss' to a woman whose maid he had got pregnant while trying to seduce her, and who was confident he could 'please her' by writing a long string of insults about the destitute and once more pregnant-by-him Jean Armour....
- as a poet: I've just been introduced to AE Housman's assessment of him: “If you imagine a Scotch commercial traveller in a Scotch commercial hotel leaning on the bar and calling the barmaid ‘Dearie’ then you will know the keynote of Burns’s verse.” Hear hear, Alfred Edward!
- as a colleague: M was revolted, in his time at the Customs and Excise Museum, by the way Burns had sought preferment in the Excise by informing on other local excisemen who were 'stamping their rides'. Every local excise officer was allocated a 'ride', a fixed circuit of local businesses that he had to visit regularly to verify their output, calculate the duty payable, record the visit in his books and stamp the entry. A ride could be a very long distance, and when the weather was foul and the roads terrible there was a very strong temptation to decide that "Up in the morning’s no for me" and just stay indoors, write in some plausible figures for the whole ride and stamp it. Burns being Burns, I don't doubt he did that sometimes too. So did Tom Paine, who was sacked from the Excise for it in 1765 - but at least Paine (as far as we know) didn't shop his mates for it to curry favour with the bosses. So much for the Brotherhood of Man!
Altogether, Burns sounds like just the man who would have enjoyed nothing more than a night out with the Presidents Club, and I'm sure he would have been a big hit with them too.
Still, in a village community you can't be too fussy; M's mum wants to go, and M and I love a good haggis. At least there's one piece of good news - the usual piper, whose ghastly repertoire of 'professional Scotsman' jokes and stories we all know by heart by now, was already booked (probably doesn't like the current landlord any more than anybody else does) and the landlord has been obliged to engage a female piper. So there will be less sexist joshing, and if she takes it on herself to make jokes at all at least they will be different ones. (Might even be ever-so-slightly subversive: I'm quite intrigued. We'll see.)