Burns Night

Saturday was Logan's birthday, but it was also the birthday of famous Scottish poet Robert Burns. Burns died in 1796, and the first Burns Night supper was held in 1802. It was held on January 29 because the first Burns Club got his date of birth wrong (x).

Burns is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.

He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish Diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.

As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world today include "A Red, Red Rose"; "A Man's a Man for A' That"; "To a Louse"; "To a Mouse"; "The Battle of Sherramuir"; "Tam o' Shanter"; and "Ae Fond Kiss" (x).

A Burns supper is a supper held in Burns' honour - Burns suppers are most common in Scotland and Northern Ireland however there has been a surge in Burns' Night celebrations in the UK events industry seeing the evening being celebrated outside their traditional confines of Burns Clubs, Scottish Societies, expatriate Scots, or aficionados of Burns' poetry (x).

While there was talking of us MSc students attending a Burns' night céilidh (a traditional Gaelic social gathering, which usually involves playing Gaelic folk music and dancing) we aren't exactly A+ at organization, and Friday we were still trying to organize something, while also discovering that a majority of the Burns Night céilidhs were sold out (x). I thus decided to have a very informal Burns Night potluck at my flat Saturday night. There were about 12 people in attendance, and a *lot* of good food (I am still eating the leftovers) and an entire huge trash bag of bottles were also left in my possession to haul down four flights of stairs and down the street (as I told David, the next time I have a party, the rule is going to be you drink out of a can or you don't drink at all). Eve "made" haggis, and I learned that the traditional way of preparing haggis in many Scottish households is to boil it. Which was slightly disillusioning. But Ali read "Address to a Haggis" by Burns, in Scots, so it was still all very Scottish.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye worthy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o need,
While thro your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An cut you up wi ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an strive:
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
The auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
'Bethankit' hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout,
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi perfect scunner,
Looks down wi sneering, scornfu view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckless as a wither'd rash,
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro bloody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He'll make it whissle;
An legs an arms, an heads will sned,
Like taps o thrissle.

Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies:
But, if ye wish her gratefu prayer,
Gie her a Haggis (x)

I neglected to take any pictures, but it was a great night spent with friends, laughing a *lot* and eating some delicious food.

Cash Money

While England might have the same Queen on their money, the cash money here is a bit different - notably in the denominations of the coins, and in the size of the notes.

One of the hardest parts of moving to Scotland was having to go back to using the penny... sorry, one pence coin. About the same size and colour as the penny, its also probably the easiest coin to deal with.

The singularly stupidest thing in this country is the two pence coin. Bad enough to have to go back to using a one pence coin, but a TWO PENCE COIN? I get that it makes it easier to give change, but my god... what a stupid denomination.

Next is the five pence, which is probably the most confusing coin for me, as it is about the same size as a dime.

The ten pence coin is one of the largest coins...

While the twenty pence coin goes down in size, but up in thickness.

The fifty pence coin is actually quite useful, especially since bus fares are generally £1.50.

The one pound coin is quite thick, probably about two coins pressed together. There is also a two pence coin which I didn't have one of, much like the toonie, they are less common, and appear to be one coin pressed inside a second one.

All of the coins next to a Canadian quarter for size comparison.

The bills here are also very interesting. They are issued by the individual banks, so while they are all the same size and close to the same colour (blue for £5, brown for £10, and purple for £20), they have different bank names and pictures on them. In terms of size, they are taller and less long than Canadian bills.

You also end up with notes from the Bank of England in the mix. Fun fact: while English pounds are accepted universally in Scotland, Scottish pounds, while technically legal currency, are often either scoffed at or outright refused in England, depending on where you are. Another fun fact: no bank notes, including Bank of England notes, are considered legal tender in Scotland.

The bills all also have something to the effect of "the bank promises to provide the bearer of the bill with £__ sterling when presented with the bill" - so the bank issues their own notes, on the condition that they can guarantee that they can provide pounds sterling in exchange, on demand. You can read more about the system here if you want.

City of the Dead

Be warned: below is really gory and creepy things. Not photos, just stories (not many photos taken as this was all at night).

So last night I went on a Haunted Graveyard tour with Melissa (from Toronto) and Alix (from Belgium). The company is called City of the Dead (you may have noticed that I shamelessly stole my title from them). Their byline is "Not just a tour. A PHENOMENON" which is rather fantastic.

From the website:

"The Graveyard tour combines the weirdest history with the wildest stories and wickedest humour around. Best of all, City of the Dead has access to Edinburgh's Covenanters Prison and the Black Mausoleum - lair of the world famous MacKenzie Poltergeist. An encounter with the poltergeist is the highlight of the tour, with hundreds of people claiming to have been attacked by the entity. The MacKenzie Poltergeist is now regarded as the best documented supernatural case of all time and the tour has become equally famous. WARNING: The MacKenzie Poltergeist can cause genuine physical and mental distress. You join the tour at your own risk."

We met at St. Giles Cathedral, which you might know from previous photos...

...at seven, so it was already dark out when we arrived. We then walked over to the Greyfriars Graveyard, where we went into the Covenanters Prison and the Black Mausoleum. It was a rather cold and wet night, which quite set the mood.

All of the stories were set about 300-400 years ago.

The stories started with a charming one of Edinburgh's history of torture and extremely poor sewage disposal. After the defeat of the Scottish by the English under the command of one of the King James', the Scots beat a hasty retreat to Edinburgh, where they proceeded to spend the next 47 years building a really big wall around the city. 50 years later, the English finally arrived, and walked through the front door, handily left unlocked by a drunken gatekeeper. The only remaining part of the wall is located within the graveyard, so we got to see that. Which was super cool.

So while Edinburgh was kind of boxed in by this wall for 50 years, the city was forced to grow up as it could no longer grow out. It had the first kind of skyscraper, reaching a quite amazing 14 stories in some spots. The first floors were brick and stone, while the tops were wood, and the streets were incredibly narrow, so at night the buildings would actually sag enough that they would touch. And if one of them collapsed or caught fire, it quickly created a domino effect. There was also no sewage disposal in the city of the time, resulting in buckets of waste being thrown out into the street every night (with a shouted warning, which unfortunate tourists responded to by immediately looking back up). However, there was no drainage, so the filth was so thick on the streets they had to sometimes dig out their doorways to get to work in the morning. You had to slog through waste and rats to get anywhere.

So the residents of Edinburgh decided to distract themselves with some torture. Of course the witch hunts were all the rage in Europe. The particular torture our tour guide outlined for us… you might want to skip ahead to the next paragraph if you're squeamish. The accused witch would be tied down onto a table, where a red hot metal cage would be placed over their chest. If that wasn't enough, a starved rat would be then placed in the cage, and hot coals raked over the cage until the rat, desperate to escape the heat, would begin to eat down. If the "witch" was lucky, the rat would hit their heart and they would die quickly. If not, the rat would go through or, alternatively, choke in the person's chest and rot in there for how ever long it took the poor person to die. If that wasn't enough, for fun, the torturers would also take people (usually women) and for some casual entertainment torture, knock multiple holes in their skull, and then thread maggots into the holes, before bandaging them up, and then sit back and watch the effects on the women (from hysterical laughter to muscle spasms) until they got close to death, when they bashed their face in with glass bottles. It was considered an honour to get the woman to last the longest before they died.

We then walked into the graveyard. There are 400-some gravestones left in the graveyard, however, there are an estimated 200-400,000 bodies buried there.

Grave robbing became a very big thing in Edinburgh when advances in medicine and other academics resulted in a higher demand for medical cadavers. With only one cadaver allocated to the university per year, a very profitable market in grave robbing grew - the robbers would make a week's wages for a single night of work, but it was considered the most dishonourable way to make money. They would pick the freshest graves both because they were the freshest bodies but also because they were the easiest to dig and the freshly disturbed dirt hid their activities. They would dig a small circular hole, then hook the body by the nostrils and pull them out of the grave. Wealthy persons would pay to have metal cages placed over their graves to deter robbers.

One day, a pair of robbers dug up a woman who happened to be wearing a quite valuable ring. When all other methods failed, they attempted to bite the ring off her finger - at which point the woman sat up and gave a blood curdling shriek.

Because of fear of the various forms of the plague, a death certificate was not always necessary, and quick burials were common, resulting in people being buried alive (the woman above went on to outlive her husband, remarry, and have several more children). As a result, people would pay to have a bell installed by their tombstone, with a string going down to their coffin so that if they woke up in a grave, they could ring the bell and be rescued.

Understandably, no one was really keen on answering a bell ringing in a graveyard, and no one was ever rescued by this method.

As Lord Advocate for Charles II, George Mackenzie was the minister responsible for the persecuting policy against the Scottish Presbyterian Covenanters. After the Covenanters' defeat at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679, Mackenzie imprisoned 1,200 Covenanters in a field next to Greyfriars Kirkyard. While some were executed, the majority were left to suffer for five months, given the bare minimum to be kept alive, serving as an ongoing message against treason, earning him the nickname "Bloodly Mackenzie". After his grave was disturbed by a hapless homeless man (who had the unfortunate luck of falling, in the dark, through a rotten floor in the tomb into one of nine illegal plague pits in the city - a living soup of hundreds of rotting bodies) reports of poltergeist activity began to emerge. It is apparently one of the best recorded hauntings in the world, with people reporting bruises, scars, burns, convulsions, being thrown into walls… it was eventually locked until the tour bought the key from the council.

We then entered the Black Mausoleum, where we were regaled with more stories of the Mackenzie poltergeist before having the shit scared out of us by a man dressed in black, which was a good laugh.

Before leaving we found up from the tour guide where the Tom Riddle grave was (the guide laughed and said he could tell we were going to ask that) but decided to come back to it during the day.

Afterwards we went to warm up with a cuppa at the Elephant Room, which as I mentioned before, is the most famous cafe attached to JK's writing career.

Yum!

Me, Melissa, and Alix. 

Definitely going to go back to the graveyard sometime during the day, to take some photos of the sites mentioned.

Tea & Cake

Last Sunday Kate and I decided to have another go at the massive institution that is the National Museum of Scotland. Its a good thing its free, because I think there is still a good two visits worth of things we haven't touched on.

After leaving the museum, we both decided we were quite hungry, though it was the awkward time of 3 pm - too early for dinner, too late for lunch. We reached the conclusion that stopping for cake and tea on our way home was really the only option. While we briefly discussed the possibility of going to The Elephant House (the most famous location in JK Rowling's writing career), we decided to instead check out lovecrumbs, a cake shop that several of our classmates had recommended to us. However, when we attempted to enter the shop, we discovered it was unfortunately packed, and we were forced to abandon it for another time.

Instead, we ended up at Loudon's Cafe, which, while still very full, still had a couple of seats free. When you entered, you were faced with a selection of cakes and pastries, which you served yourself to, before continuing in line to order your drink and pay. I decided on the delicious blackberry and apple cake (a difficult decision), and a very delicious drink called "Wild Elderflower Bubbly"

I love this country.

Feel The Burn

As I mentioned in my last post, this Monday morning I got up bright and early and met 28 (or so) of my classmates at school, where we boarded two minibuses and headed north. 

From the website:

It was gifted in 1948 to Goodenough College by the late Mr & Mrs Herbert Russell in memory of their son James, who was killed in action in 1944 aged 21. The Burn is a holiday and study centre for students, graduates and academic staff from around the world.

The house, built in 1791 and now completely modernised, consists of a large drawing room, dining room, library, TV room, indoor games room and has 18 bedrooms and 1 flat. It is centrally heated throughout and during your stay you can look forward to quality cooking with the best home grown ingredients - Chef's Corner.

Standing in 190 acres of park and woodland on the banks of the River North Esk, The Burn affords peace and relaxation for holidays and study in excellent accommodation at low cost, subsidised by the generous Russell legacy.

This little building, separate from the main building, was where eight of us girls stayed, which was pretty awesome, even if we had to go outside for breakfast, because it had more bathrooms per person than the main building (where the bathrooms were undergoing renovation). 

Candice and Kate standing by the main entrance...

Some casual Ming Vases 

I can't quite remember what this building was (they mentioned it when they were talking about previous years visits, but we were too far behind the main group to head the explanation again - I think it was some kind of hunting 'hut' or something).

Some other (shorter) people were able to get the entire circle in the frame of their cameras... but unless I was willing to lie on the ground, that wasn't gonna work for me.

The majority of the photos I took were from a walk we took the first day there, where six of us managed to fall so far behind (taking pictures) on the way back that we managed to miss a turn that the rest of the group took. We were not lost, however, and easily retraced our way back to the house. However, when we arrived we realized that we were the only ones there and were just trying to decide what to do when we spotted one of our lecturers running up - when they realized we had missed the turn, he had run all the way back to attempt to catch up with us - but only managed to catch up to us when we had already arrived back at the house.

But we didn't get lost. The rest of the group did.

Okay, this was really cool (and apparently a one-of-a-kind structure). It was a tunnel built to move cattle from the upper part of the estate to the lower without disturbing guests, and has two air vents along its length.

I got really, really excited when I saw the holly tree.

A really fun trip. Not necessarily the most academically vigorous exercise of my life, but a great deal of fun. It was reading week this week, so we didn't have class (even for those who did not go on the trip) so its not like my learning suffered from my attendance. Lots of bonding and fun activities, and a good chance to hang out with people I had not yet had the opportunity to spend time with!

Plus it was gorgeous. 

We returned Wednesday after several very full days, stopping briefly in Dundee at the headquarters of Scottish publishing house DC Thomson (the house behind famous magazine Beano), where we were given a tour of the actual printing presses, as well as a talk on the operation of the house and a tour of the magazine offices. 

It was very cool, and I was geeking out pretty hard the entire time.