It's Burns Night in Scotland, so haggis and whisky are being consumed in vast quantities, although not by me. I've been to a couple of good ones in the past, but I can't think of a Burns Supper now without remembering Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle:

You canna gang to a Burns supper even
Wi-oot some wizened scrunt o a knock-knee
Chinee turns roon to say, 'Him Haggis - velly goot!'
And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney.

No wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote
But misapplied is aabody's property,
And gin there was his like alive the day
They's be the last a kennin haund to gie -

Croose London Scotties wi their braw shirt fronts
And aa their fancy freens rejoicin
That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Bagdad - and Hell, nae doot - are voicin

Burns' sentiments o universal love,
In pidgin English or in wild-fowl Scots,
And toastin ane wha's nocht to them but an
Excuse for faitherin Genius wi their thochts.

Burns was a great poet, and maybe even a greater writer and collector of folk songs. His method, he said, was to become familiar with the traditional melody, to catch a suggestion from some fragment of the old song; then, humming or whistling the tune as he went about his work, to work out new verses, going into the house to write them down when inspiration began to flag.

So, as an alternative way of celebrating the life of 'The Ploughman Poet' here's a piece of ancient pibroch music from the Isle of Skye, which a friend of mine arranged and recorded on guitar. Burns probably didn't know it, but I feel he might have liked it.

The Harp Tree [mp3]
arranged and played by George Adams.