So, you indoctrinated me on Robert Burns. Now what?

Happy Burns Night! On the 25th January 1759, Robert Burns was born in Ayr, Scotland, thereby condemning centuries of children to the torturous task of learning his poetry off by heart.

I don’t know how many days there are to celebrate specific poets internationally, which always makes Burns day a bit of a to-do in these parts.

Part of that – for many children – may have involved a torturous first term back after the Christmas holidays where each ‘language’ lesson becomes a supreme effort to learn a Rabbie Burns (or Robert Burns, if you’re fancy) poem off by heart.

I don’t know how many kids this still holds true for

It’s over a decade and change since I was at primary school – but I’ve double checked with my mum and she remembers this being the case.

I was born, raised, and schooled in Scotland. It’s obviously had something of a knock-on effect as to who I am as a person; provided gateways into future interests and set me up (to some degree) for the rest of my life. I also learned some amount of stuff that’s really had very little relevance to the rest of my existence that for some reason I can’t convince to leave my head.

The weirdest part of that, is that to this day, I have not made any effort to practise or retain my retinue of Scots poetry and yet I can recite several lines of Burns’ straight off the top of my head.

Of course, this is a hard skill to convey over a blog post on the internet, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Some people might point out that it’s relatively unremarkable.

Some people have several poems on rote to perform as part of their yearly Burns supper, many people sing his music, lots of people just love poetry.

The thing is, I don’t. Or rather, I didn’t.

As soon as I left primary school, and they stopped forcing me to do yearly Burns recitals, I threw myself into the ‘I hate poetry’ pit that to this day I am struggling to clamber out of.

But they indoctrinated us young in my tiny village school; hit us over the head with ‘Robert Burns’, ‘National Bard’ and ‘Haggis, Neeps and Tatties’ until the two things are part and parcel with the idea of being Scottish itself.

Unfortunately, as far as it goes, I’m not the authority on all things Burns competition; I only attended one, aged eight or nine.

And an event it was, indeed.

There were four of us set out from my school, myself, a laddie from my year, and my older brother and a lassie from his. We trooped off in a mini bus from our tiny village school (which might explain why two of us were from the same family) to a facility that used to do teacher training in Auchterderran, in Cardenden in the west of Fife.

We sat in a stuffy, airless room surrounded on every side by other kids in colourful jumpers and polos. Our own school uniform was distinctly obvious with a gigantic bright yellow logo of a field mouse nestled against an electric blue background. We were very aware of how visible we were.

So we sat, and sweated, and me and my friend – both languishing at the end of the alphabet – waited for the chance to get up there, fight our nerves and the growing heat of the room, and perform the hell out of our poems.

I remember reciting the poem A Dug, A Dug by Bill Keys; non-Burns poems in Scots were recommended for the junior division.

It’s not exactly a sparklingly victorious memory.

I remember standing in the middle of a stuffy room and doing all the voices – it’s a back and forth argument . My friend, on his turn, recited The Boy in the Train by Mary Campbell Smith.

I remember feeling a little smug, as his was not the only performance of The Boy in the Train, but mine had been the one and only rousing effort of A Dug, A Dug.  (Of course, I was fair sair when my classmate gained the ‘highly commended’ accolade at the end of the day, and I got jack shit, but that’s not his fault.)

How very naïve I was.

What followed, the Primary 6 – 7 division, is what I can only describe to you as a distinctly Scottish flavoured hell; like flat Irn-Bru, or the American spelling of “whiskey”.

If you’ve ever experienced a Fife Council packed lunch – a sweaty cheese sandwich, a carton of lukewarm fruit flavoured juice, and a weirdly furry feeling apple – then you can imagine the mood in the room as fifty-odd under-13s trooped back into the same hot room for the afternoon.

My one overwhelming memory of the event is hearing the opening lines of the poem Tae A Moose over and over and over and over again.

Now, this is a wonderful poem, commenting on man, nature, and politics of the late 1700s. It’s also nice and short, and very readable.

Thing is, a room full of kids don’t know jack shit about the cultural connotations and nuances of Robert Burns’ poetry. All they know is that there’s a wee blonde lassie up there doing a ear-splitting falsetto “mouse voice” and what’s worse, is that there’s another one right behind her.

I recall mostly three poems from that recital: Tae a Moose, Tam O’Shanter, and Address tae the Haggis. It’s worth mentioning: my brother recited Tam O’Shanter. Our other classmate, Tae A Moose.

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they were good. Cameron, my brother, must have been pretty decent, as I’m pretty sure he got some sort of accolade. Unfortunately, I can’t remember them as distinct from the rabble of three poems. Over, and over, and over again.

Then it was over – thank God.

The next year, I was ready for the senior division, and so when the post-Christmas crucible arose, I chose my Burns poem carefully: The Banks O’ Doon. (Yes, wise guys, it’s a poem as well as a song.)

One of my friends chose A Red, Red Rose. A rookie mistake.

I lost the audition for the Fife Schools Burns Competition by popular demand, and the blow to my pride was worth it for the excuse to wash my hands of this whole Robert Burns debacle for good.

Or so I had thought.

See, in this time, my older brother had moved on up to bigger and better things – including ascending to secondary school and picking up chanter – the precursor to bagpipes.

 Unfortunately for me, Cameron was not only still in the ring, but he was also in the big leagues.

That’s right folks, the jammy bastard sang – literally sang – Duncan Gray and what followed for him was a cavalcade of – surely well deserved – recognition. Don’t ask me – take St Andrews Burns Club’s word for it.

He went, again, to the Fife School’s competition, and he won at every turn. We even had a (admittedly kind of ugly) engraved vase with Rabbie Burn’s face on it sat on our dining room side-board until the following January.

 If I know my family, my mother probably even put baubles in it at Christmas.

Alas.

When I went to secondary school myself, I made sure to steer clear of the annual Burns supper.

I was forced into one horribly pitchy attempt at singing Duncan Gray myself in my S2 music class – which immediately and forever put Miss Black, the new music teacher, on my shit list – but aside from the odd song in January music classes, which was only compulsory for two years, Burns didn’t really feature in the rest of my schooling.

When I went to university I chose a couple Scotland-centric courses in History, but I somehow avoided Burns and his ilk in Literature by leaving my comfy little Scotland bubble and widening my horizons.

But Burns never really went away.

Scotland smacks you round the face with him every January, after all.

I guess I couldn’t stay mad at him, and Fife Schools forever. But I think approaching Burns from an angle aside from head on was the only possible way I’d ever get over my aversion.

I still struggle to find the concept of joy in the thought of sitting through a Burns Supper, and a high pitched rendition of Tae a Moose will probably ring in my ears when I’m dying.

But I did find some of his other, more interesting poems, like Address tae the Deil, a favourite of mine,all on my own, did revisit and enjoy aspects of his work that were completely lost on me as a kid. And…okay, so, now, I don’t hate him. In fact, I really enjoy him.

But would I have bothered to read, or re-read him if they didn’t force me to as a kid?

I guess everyone’s answer to that will be different, but I daresay, for me – no. I could probably have managed to go my whole life without reading Robert Burns.

And I think that would’ve been a damn shame, in more than one way.