As in the new film about the Great War's Christmas truce, we open wi' a helicopter shot, the camera sweeping low o'er heather and stones. By magic of editing, we enter through a window to find a man wi' a long knife poised, ready to thrust through flesh and juices into the warm, reeking, gushing entrails of a four pound haggis, steaming on a trencher. Around the table sit characters, expectant, drawn together by love of Burns, conversation, promise of whisky and wine: Souter Johnie and his guid wife Meg, Laura, my ain fine wife, a humble yoga-teaching Stuart (aw' Stuarts are nae kith to the King) and his wife Dana, the Reverend Paul (actually a jolly painter), Helen and Pete, Bob and Terese, Julia, our lovely highland lassie, wi' her rosy lips and hair so fair. The man with the nineteenth century kitchen knife, holding the foot-long blade and his audience as he recites the "Address" from memory, is my father, come across the water and now completely in his element. So rapt, we await the annual plunge.
Here's me, earlier, realizing this big haggis should have simmered for forty five minutes *per pound,* not forty five minutes. In a T.V. cooking show move I reached into the freezer for my "reserve haggis," this one sma'. Leaving the main pudding sitting like a fat prince in hot water, I microwaved the wee 'un. Poetic irony! When the address was all done and both the skins had been pierced by Dad's firm hand, it was the wet one people judged dry.
Glasses are charged from amber bottles, and toasts offered all around--here's tae us, wha's like us, damn few and they're aw' dead! Slices lie now hot on plates as I read from Robert Service's poem about the First World War, in which the dirty, stop-at-nothing Germans drop bombs on a prize haggis, fresh-unwrapped from home. I wind the tale up: Private Mc Phun is blind as a bat, Private Mc Phee has nae leg below the knee. Their comrades charge upon the Hun, every man with death in his ee, horrified by the ruination of the haggis o' Private McPhee. Such an apt dinner starter.
Now over the top the roast beef comes, the neeps, and tatties follow, with trifle crouched in close support. Our stomachs, like bagpiped infantry, are stoic in assault. Eager as the market crowd, when "Catch the thief" resounds aloud, or as bees bizz out wi' angry fyke, when plundering herds assail their byke, up our conversation lofts and rises, then falls again on light-won prizes. My father slips whisky onto his haggis, takes a bite. Words come my way in a jumble, "pleasures are like volatile esters spread, and scattered oats, and hefty bread; memories that at a certain age mix fondly in your head, like stew or French ragout or olio or fricassee warmed fresh frae Marks and Sparks."
More talk follows, good and better yet. The evening, well begun, like many a wave scampers on, till late, when finally the full and glorious think on rolling out, then fortune, as sometimes haps in fog o' war, cracks a wintery smile; at the table we forget to sing, and so there's no last chance to harden that treacherous "s" in "syne."
David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
