It’s Burns Night and Scotland’s haggis makers must feel like Santa on Christmas Day. The busiest part of the year is over and they can put their feet up, safe in the knowledge that they won’t have to stuff another sheep’s stomach for at least a couple of weeks.
Naturally, the papers are full of haggis related articles. The Scotsman has an interview with the Macsween haggis makers which tells you more than you will ever need to know about the state of the haggis market in 2010. The Herald has a piece on a surge in sales of the sonsie-faced pudding. Amid all the steam of simmering haggis, The Times has a more cautionary tale in which a group of whisky experts are shocked by a Taiwanese whisky which beats its Scottish competitors in a blind tasting.
Never ones to miss a marketing opportunity, Glenfiddich has enlisted the Scottish writer and expert on modern Scottish dialect, Alan Bissett, to modernise Burns’ famous poem ‘Address to a Haggis’.
Explaining the meaning of his modernised poem, Bissett says: “There are various traditions, such as haggis and ‘social dancing’ which Scottish children are taught at school but don’t particularly enjoy. However, as you age, you grow to love these traditions and now at any wedding or social gathering, people who hated traditional dancing at school, throw themselves into it with glee. The same thing happens with haggis: put off by awful school dinners on Burns’ day, most only learn to love it as adults as their tastes mature – along with a delicious wee dram of course.”
Glenfiddich 2010 Address to a Haggis
By Alan Bissett
The white, the orange and the broon!
This tricolour of Scotland froons
up at ye fae a dinner plate wan doon
fae anither that’s supposed tay be the same,
but which – somehow? – looks mair roonded,
heaped and geez it than yer ain?
In school dinner queues that spicy scent
felt prickly on the senses, meant
it must be January, which wid be spent
memorisin poems by some lang-deid chanty-rastler
Who yaized words ye never kent.
Ye couldnay run hame faster.
Soon, menshies ay the haggis ye’d spot
in that film Highlander. Sean Connery’s in a boat
wi Christoph Lambert (a Frenchman playin a Scot,
and Connery’s an Egyptian born in Spain
who’s never hearday haggis? Whit a lottay
sheep-guts-stuffed-wi-entrails! Come again?)
‘What is haggis?’ asks Sir Sean, Christoph Lambert then goes on
tae talk about it like it’s Marks and Spencer’s food porn,
though its fillin’s no exactly…quorn.
So when big Sean finds oot it’s yaized in meals?
And isnay thrown or rolled alang the grund or sat on?
‘How revolting!’ James Bond femininely squeals.
But ye learntay love it, like ye learn tae love the ‘social dancin’,
that rank embarrassment of boy-line, girl-line, glancin
at each other across a school gymnasium, chancin
yer airm wi the brawest in the class?
Nae danger! But, years later, at a weddin in some country mansion,
it clicks, comes back, ye’re whirlin fullay sass!
That’s how it happens wi the puddin, deep and grey,
Ye never thought ye’d see the day
When at a Burns do for yer work ye’d say,
‘Oh, that is one braw bittay haggis there.
A vintage…I recognise the flock, yes…Rothsay
mutton. D’ye have some mair?’
So let us praise the splendour of this ball
of Scottishness, bold as Bruce and sharp of temperament as Wallace,
parcelled up and ett in small,
hot forkfuls of soft mince,
Aromatic, fillin tay the stomach walls,
A feast fit, even, for a Bonny Prince.
The tongue it touches tender, shredded lamb
mixed in wi barley, then ye cram
it doon. Don’t let the inbox of yer belly fill wi spam
When ye should be heartily
raisin up an amber, glintin dram tae toast the haggis wi.
The night’s just gettin startit…