In addition to the Dark Moon, the solar eclipse and the Chineses new year ( the Year of the Ox), it is also Burns’ Night and I am profoundly grateful I shall not be forced to go out with Scottish friends and eat haggis, tatties and neeps in a frightening offal-soured gravy. Or watch beaming friends who should know better do Highland Reels or imitations of Kenneth McKellor on the slippery banks of Loch Lomond. The Scots are all very Jekyll & Hyde when it comes to being pious and thrifty at 10am and debauched and raucous at 2am.
But one of my ancestors was a wife of Burns the serial polygamist and my father’s family come from Lanarkshire, from stone cottages with deep fireplaces and stone lintels and cowsheds and will o’ the wisps glimpsed in the hedgerows in the gloaming. The Tam O’ Shanter folk stories are part of my heritage and I always get a little Celtic on Burns Night.
My Welsh witches of course are admiring snowdrops and slaying dragons and communing with deities who inhabit the Nile, but I go back to the wild Scottish expatriates of my childhood in Kenya and the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, great men with flaming red beards and women dancing on crossed swords and bonfires blazing up to the fiddlers’ tunes. The stories of Scotland before the First World War, the legends of kelpies and seal women and white horses riding into dark lakes and ghosts that follow youngsters home after the milking, the abductions by faeries — and the waking in a chilly dawn amidst bracken, the golden halls and dance music gone, the human child banished from the magical lands forever. Haunted by that sweet malicious laughter, silvery and echoing on the silent hillside, the doors into the Other World closed and invisible, barred to the exile.
Robbie Burns himself died of heart disease at the age of 37, still a young man and with the child’s innocent and gullible heart. He had the Romantic’s unerring grasp of what nature holds for the searcher after the unknown:
‘The voice of Nature loudly cries,
And many a message from the skies,
That something in us never dies’
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