The risks of being an Englishman on Burns Night

I’m rubbish at public speaking and detest it. Even the thought of reciting an English poem of my choice at a Burns Night Supper cast a long shadow beforehand, in spite of the strong probability that everyone at the table would be blootered when the time came for me to get to my feet. A further problem was: which poem should an Englishman choose to read at a celebration of Scottishness, if not of Scottish nationalism? Should it perhaps be an English riposte? Or would something amiable and irrelevant be more politic? A comic poem maybe? A comic poem in a comic dialect? Lewis Carroll? ‘’Twas brillig’, and so on? On the train up I took a doorstep anthology and speed-read English poetry, from Thomas Traherne to Ted Hughes, from one end of England to the other, unsuccessfully.

The males at the dinner wore the kilt, sporran, sock flashes, sgian-dubh (sock dagger) and ghillies.