After-burns

I went to a Burn's Supper with Jane last night. I hadn't really expected to enjoy it, it all sounded a bit too stuffy and formal for me. A "proper" sit-down do with fancy cutlery and everything. Jane drilled some of the rules into me during the taxi ride:

• Don't sit down before the top table.
• Don't start eating a course before the top table.
• You can't get up and go for a pee until the "admin break", which is about 3 hours after the meal starts.

Woah, next you'll be telling me no burping contests!

But at some point in the evening I began to realise just what fun it was...

... i think it was around the time that I looked down at the table in front of me and realised that as well as the array of cutlery I had four different alcholic drinks on the go. A glass of some rather fine whisky, two glasses of wine (one red, one white, both very passable), and a glass of port. The rest of the port and whisky were in big bottles on the table, and people kept coming around topping up the wine! w00t! :-)

To be fair, the freely-flowing drink wasn't the only thing that made it fun. At some point the drone of the pipes, the fine highland accents of the poetry readers and the warm 12-year-old single malt coursing though my veins combined to ignite some latent Calendonian passions I never knew I had! By the end of the night I was almost tempted to research the McVerite tartan*.

God bless the Scots! Every last haggis-eating, poetry-spouting, alcohol-dependent one of them!



*I'm hoping it's pink. And finishes well above the knee.