January 25th is a very important night in Scotland and around the world. It is Burns Night, a time when Scots all over read Burns Poetry, massacre a poor haggis in order to eat it with neeps and tatties and of course drink a lot of whiskey, like this handsome chap here - my date. This is him, 5 minutes into the first speech.

I attended two Burns Suppers, one hosted by Bank ofScotland for all its many posh clients and the other by the world famous Scottish New Yorker lawyer, Allen Rooney, at Clancy's bar on the upper east side. I managed to talk to the host into letting me read Burn's most famous poem,Tam O Shanter, it is only 20 minutes long so I promised to cut a bit out as New York audiences have a five minute attention span, but well all of it is so good, I just kept most of it in.
Naturally the audience loved it and many asked me to perform the whole thing again, maybe to pick up bits they missed.

Here is a quick snippet -

"Ah Tam, AhTam, thou'll get thy fairin
In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin
In vain thy Kate awaits thy coming
Kate soon will be a woefu' woman."

In translation, Kate's man Tam is a "blethering,blistering, drunken bellum", ie a chatterbox numbskull drunkard and will probably not make it home but will be roasted in hell like a herring, a popular Scottish appetizer, instead, a deserved reward for a louse like him. A bit like my date for the night, I mean would you look at him.