
” Is there another country anywhere where actually teaching your own language in your own schools to your own people would be seen as somehow controversial and politically divisive?”
” Is there another country anywhere where actually teaching your own language in your own schools to your own people would be seen as somehow controversial and politically divisive?”
“My plaidie to the angry airt,/I’d shelter thee, I’d shelter thee:”
The pandemic enforced absence of Burns suppers has given me a chance to revisit my thoughts on Scotland’s most famous son, and has forced me to ask a really important fundamental question.
Fresh southwesterly winds veering westerly later. Maximum temperature 9 °C.
We celebrate the work of Robert Burns with this beautiful poem and song
“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin’-race!”
“When chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neebors, neebors meet,”
“I have often said to myself what are the boasted advantages which my country reaps from a certain Union that counterbalance the annihilation of her Independence, and even her very name!” Robert Burns
To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough was written by Burns in November 1785, and was featured in the Kilmarnock volume.
“At the end of a turbulent, desperate and – let’s be honest – hellish year, this week was proof positive that Scotland is increasingly comfortable in its own very distinct political culture and worldview. Support for normal democracy amongst Scots nudges sixty percent. And it will only grow.”