Haggis? Don't Forget To Flush!

As we know, Gentle Reader, tomorrow is Robbie Burns Day.  Aren't we excited.  Heather corsages and piping in the Haggis and lifting a wee dram.  Make it more than a wee dram because you're going to need whatever it takes to wash down that culinary horror.  Have we noticed that there is no such thing as a Scottish restaurant?  For one to exist we would require such a thing as Scottish cuisine!  Deep fried Mars Bars anyone?

Just let me do a quick Google search.

Nope.  Not a single Scottish restaurant, not anywhere.  Outside of Scotland.  I tried haggis once.  That was one time too many.  The memory of the trauma is still raw even after thirty-six years!  Not even if offered a vegetarian version would I let it come anywhere near my lips.

Even though my father was Scottish Robbie Burns Day was not a big deal in our household, perhaps because my mother was German.  I only learned about it in my early twenties.  Liking neither haggis nor bagpipes (though the music has grown a bit on me over the years) and caring not especially for heather nor the poetry of Robbie Burns I never really paid much attention.  I really can't understand why such a mediocre writer of mediocre verse would gain fame as a national mascot.  And heather?  Probably one of the most insipid flowering shrubs that ever existed.

Scotland, and Scottish culture such as it is, really doesn't have much to commend itself.  I was in Edinburgh once for four days in 1991.  The city has its beauty, especially the medieval part of town and the castle and cathedral, but it always felt to me kind of bleak and desolate.  In the gully below the castle bluff lies a fascinating cemetery by the way.  I visited there late my first night there reading inscriptions of people dead for three hundred years and got happily lost there for a while.  The countryside and hills that surround Edinburgh are beautifully green in June but there aren't any trees.  The landscape was deforested centuries ago and nothing outside of grass, heather and broom and gorse have replaced the trees.   I did climb to the summit of one of these hills.  It is called Arthur's Seat.  There is at the peak a natural stone saddle that I lay in while feeling the wild wind whip my face and my head and my hair.  I heard the haunting singing of skylarks and the menacing croak of jackdaws and just then glimpsed the subtle and savage beauty that marks the Scottish country and the Scottish people.

I would say that the beauty of Scotland lies in its people: tough, strong, resilient, humorous, silent, sensitive and loyal.  Along with Walker's shortbread, the Scottish people are their country's greatest export.  The shortbread is sweeter.  But the Scottish people have greater substance.