Life

Fun for the lads and lassies

In the year following Robert Burns’ death in 1796, nine of his friends gathered to celebrate his memory, with what is now known as a Burns Supper. Today, Burns’ birthday, his memory is still celebrated- but on an altogether vaster scale. From the whisky sodden, relaxed evening in someone’s kitchen to a black tie occasion, each is equally worthy as a Burns Supper. In Ayrshire, Scotland, the birthplace of the Bard, multiple Suppers will be held; but, as you would expect of a poet immortalised by a statue in Central Park and translated into 80 languages, there will be celebrations as far afield as Japan, the Gulf and Russia.

At school I was forbidden to read the Burns’ poem ‘Comin’ Tho The Rye’ which J.D.Salinger’s creation, Holden Caulfield recalls. As my English teacher said, the poem is “absolutely filthy”- but he wore a broad grin as he chastised us. By all accounts, Burns, an inspiratory writer of passionate and, occasionally, erotic verse, liked women, and he walked the wild side well before they wrote the song. Only 37 when he died, he worked as a ploughman until finding fame in his published work. He could be funny, political or witty; and his words resonate with clear, pure truth: “A man’s a man for a’ that.” “The best made schemes o mice and men/ Gang aft agley”.

If all does goes to plan, then, tonight, as tradition dictates, bagpipers will pipe in the haggis, which will be Addressed (with Burns’ own The Address to a Haggis) and stabbed, as the poem dictates. Whisky will be drunk and Selkirk Graces said. After the meal (haggis, obviously) the qualities of Burns are illuminated by a speech, the Immortal Memory.

The proceedings now continue with The Toast To The Lassies, after which, a Lassie makes her Reply. This year, at the Supper I am attending, I am the Lassie responsible.

I have had a whole year to worry about this. And worry I have. I managed to divert my worries about the speech itself by worrying about the shoes I should wear. Once I had found my shoes, I decided, I would be better placed to think about my speech. Finding the perfect high of heel took much, much time by way of displacement activity shopping, and when Prada eventually supplied the perfect pair, I had no option other than to get on with the writing itself.

So here is your brief. Reply on behalf of the Ladies. Be funny, not insulting. Maybe risqué, but not overtly rude. Length? Oh, anything goes. Ten minutes. Or maybe twenty. Refer to Burns and his poetry. Oh, and after you have finished decimating the male ego, you should kiss, make up and Toast The Laddies, for you really, really cannot live without them.

There is a large temptation to Google for inspiration. I succumbed readily. I trawled through the vast trove of Internet jokes, ready- made- speeches, advice and intermittent tales of speech-making woe, which did not bode well. While I would have used anything that sounded good, I had unfortunately heard it all before. One is supposed to be original. And while the Ode To Lingerie I have composed might not do anything for Burns academics, I like to think that it is the kind of subject matter that Burns himself would have approved of.

Now, even if you can create a stunningly amusing, yet entirely chaste speech on paper, you have still got to get up there and translate it into the aural form. Men have an advantage when it comes to public speaking – and it is merely that, if married, they will probably have made some kind of speech at the event. Thus they are at a practiced advantage. And while many of my girlfriends, presumably as a post-feminist apology for allowing themselves to be given away made their own bridal speech, I did not.

Why? Well, making a speech cannot be done by an amateur such as myself without industrial quantities of adrenaline. I don’t mean that you require a cardiac arrest and a professional to pump the drug into you; rather that, under stress, your own body will make you plenty of your own. The smallness of the adrenal gland belies the potency of its product, adrenaline. In small quantities, adrenaline brings you the pleasant flutter of love. Your heart lurches, delighted at the mere sight of your beloved, but it is really adrenaline that is pushing all your buttons. However, in larger quantities, it is responsible for exam day cramps and an urgent need for the bathroom, tremulous fingers and a light axillary sweat. If you up the fear, you increase your home-made adrenaline dose; and this is when attempting wit in front of a large audience gets rather unpleasant. You get clumsy, stumbly, hesitant and dry mouthed. As you read this, I have plummeted to such depths of Pavlovian fear that the mere thought of tartan sends my heart rate soaring.

The problem is, that as every partaker of extreme sports - or indeed, as any lovesick teenager- knows, a dose of adrenaline and it’s cohort of neurochemicals can be rather pleasant. It is also heavily addictive. Balancing the production of enough adrenaline to sharpen senses and heighten reflexes, while avoiding fast garbled speech, is an inexact art. As I write, I am doing deep breathing exercises, and counting slowly up and down to ten, in the hope that that my adrenal gland switches off for a while. I have pledged to drink no alcohol- not even a glass of wine in a hope of relaxation- mainly in fear of tripping on my way to the microphone. To be deeply honest, I must also admit that having so much adrenaline coursing in my veins feels rather thrilling. That is, until I remember that this is not mere lovesickness, and exactly why I am in such a state. As the Bard himself said:

“And a' your views may come to nought,
Where ev'ry nerve is strained.”

The experience is a rite of passage. In this case, the passage is to a safe place where I can at least attend this particular Supper with the knowledge that I will never have to make the Lassies Reply again.