25 January
The Burns Night crib sheet
For whoever has been volunteered. One page, in order, with the timings, the bits people get wrong, and the four lines of grace you will be asked for while everyone watches. Print it and put it beside your plate.
Prints on one or two sides of A4. The glosses come with it.
There is no single directory of Burns Suppers you can book. For a tradition this widespread that is a strange gap. What there is, in the order I would try it:
- The interactive map of Burns Suppers from the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at Glasgow. Over 2,500 suppers in nearly 150 countries, with the menus, the toasts, the dress codes and the running orders recorded. Read it properly: this is research into suppers that have already happened, mostly around 2019 and 2020, so it is the way to find out whether anybody near you does this and what theirs is like. It is not a box office.
- The Robert Burns World Federation, the body the affiliated Burns clubs belong to, and its events page. A club supper is the real thing, and clubs are usually glad of a stranger who asks politely.
- Failing both, a plain search on Eventbrite in the first fortnight of January, when the public ticketed ones go up. Caledonian societies and St Andrew's societies are worth searching by name too, especially outside Scotland, where the diaspora keeps this going more diligently than we do.
If none of that turns anything up, the honest answer is to hold one yourself, badly, for six people. That is what the rest of this page is for, and it is nearer the original than any hotel ballroom manages. The first Burns Supper was nine men of Ayr in his own cottage at Alloway on 21 July 1801, the fifth anniversary of his death. Not his birthday, not 25 January, and not remotely grand.
The Selkirk Grace
Said seated, before the soup. Traditionally attributed to Burns, though it does not appear in his published work and is older than him in some form. Say it slowly. It is four lines and it is the first thing anybody hears.
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.
hae have · canna cannot · wad would · want it lack it · sae so · thankit thanked
The running order
About three hours all in. Cut the songs before you cut the speeches, and cut the speeches before you cut the food.
- 1
Piping in the guests
A piper, or a speaker and a recording
Optional, and grand if you have a piper. Nobody has ever complained about a recording.
- 2
The host's welcome
Host · 2 min
Short. Say who is here and why, and sit down.
- 3
The Selkirk Grace
Host, or a guest who can manage the Scots · 1 min
Everyone stays seated. Four lines, below.
- 4
Soup
15 min
Cock-a-leekie or Scotch broth, traditionally.
- 5
Piping in the haggis
Piper, cook, and the whole room · 2 min
Everyone stands and claps it in. The haggis comes in on a big plate, ideally behind a piper, at walking pace.
- 6
Address to a Haggis
The brave one · 3 min
Full text and glosses linked below. Cut the haggis on the line about ready slight, and mean it.
- 7
Toast to the haggis
Speaker leads, everyone joins · 1 min
Whisky raised. "The haggis!" Everyone repeats it, drinks, sits.
- 8
The meal
45 min
Haggis, neeps and tatties. A vegetarian haggis is a real haggis for these purposes and this is not up for discussion.
- 9
The Immortal Memory
The main speaker · 15 min
The heart of the night. Guidance below.
- 10
Toast to the Lassies
A man, traditionally · 8 min
Affectionate and funny. Not a roast. Read the room you are actually in.
- 11
Reply to the Laddies
A woman, traditionally · 8 min
Gets the last word, and should use it.
- 12
Songs, poems, recitations
Anyone willing · 25 min
Where the night is actually won or lost. Have two or three people primed in advance.
- 13
Vote of thanks
Host · 2 min
Thank the cook properly and by name.
- 14
Auld Lang Syne
Everyone, standing · 3 min
Hands joined ordinarily at the start. Cross them only on the last verse. See the note below, because almost everybody gets this wrong.
Addressing the haggis
The full text, with every Scots word glossed in the margin, is on its own page. Read it from there or print it separately. What that page will not tell you is how to survive it.
- Stand up and hold the knife. The poem is a performance and the knife is the prop. Put the plate where you can reach it.
- Slow down. Everyone reads it too fast. It is eight stanzas and it should take about three minutes.
- Cut on the line about ready slight, third stanza. One long cut down the length of it, lengthways. There will be steam, which is the point of the next line.
- The last line is the toast cue. Raise your glass on "Gie her a Haggis!", and the room drinks.
- You do not need to be Scottish and you do not need an accent. Read it in your own voice. An honest English or American reading beats a bad Rabbie impression every time.
The words that trip people
- fa'
- faw · fall, as in "fair fa'" meaning good luck to
- sonsie
- SON-see · cheerful, plump, good-natured
- aboon
- a-BOON · above
- thairm
- thairm · gut, intestine
- dight
- dicht · wipe, clean
- slight
- slicht · skill, sleight of hand
- reekin
- REEK-in · steaming
- walie
- WAH-lee · ample, choice, splendid
- nieve
- neev · fist
- sned
- sned · cut off, lop
The ch in dicht and slicht is the ch of loch. If you cannot make that sound, a hard k is a respectable substitute and no one sober will mind.
The Immortal Memory, without dying
This is the speech everyone dreads, because the brief sounds impossible: say something about Robert Burns. Here is the whole trick. It is not a lecture about his life. Everyone at the table already knows he was a ploughman who wrote Auld Lang Syne.
- Pick one thing. One poem, one line, one episode, one argument. Fifteen minutes on To a Mouse is a good speech. Fifteen minutes on his complete works is a bad one.
- Make it personal. Why that one. What it did to you, or to somebody you knew. The room forgives almost anything except being read a summary.
- Quote him, and not much else. His lines are better than yours or mine. Two or three, said properly.
- Do not tidy him up. He was in debt, unfaithful, and occasionally a snob about the very people he came from. He is more interesting whole, and the pretence fools nobody.
- Twelve to fifteen minutes. Twenty is too long. Eight well-made minutes has never once been complained about.
- Land it. Ask the company to stand, and give them "the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns". Then sit down straight away.
Auld Lang Syne, done properly
Everybody stands, everybody joins hands, and almost everybody crosses their arms at the wrong moment, which is to say at the beginning.
You join hands the ordinary way, arms uncrossed, and you sing it like that. You cross your arms and take the hands of the people on either side of you at the last verse, on And there's a hand, my trusty fiere, because that is the line where the song reaches across the table. Then you all pull in on the final chorus.
It is a small piece of choreography and it makes the difference between a room singing a song and a room meaning it. The full text is here, including the two verses nobody ever sings, one of which is about paddling in a burn and is the best thing in it.
It is auld lang syne, never "for the sake of auld lang syne", and there is no "the" in front of it. Burns wrote for auld lang syne. Sing that and you are ahead of most of the English-speaking world.
If you are catering this rather than only reciting at it, the objects actually worth owning are on books and things. There are three of them, and one of the three comes with advice to buy it somewhere else.
Kept at clanburns.scot. Print it, pass it on, mark it up. That is what it is for.