To declare that I live in Scotland when on holiday or speaking to someone over the borderless internet, generally inspires truly cringeworthy stereotypes in that person's mind.
This need to distinguish ourselves from England went OTT long ago - resulting in the awful Burns Night. Apart from the fact I've never been able to coherently read half of his poetry, he's always appeared to me to be some two-dimensional character designed solely to prop up the notion of Scottishness.
When I was in my last year of Primary school, I was the person bringing the haggis in, and the narrator for the play Tam O'Shanter after the meal. I noticed two things: 1) I'm carrying some ground up meat, why are we standing when it enters the room and addressing a speech to it? 2) No-one listening to this play (including myself) has any idea what the play is about beyond the literal.
I'm the embodiment that you can be a nationalist (and like McDairmid, also a communist) without the ridiculous ceremonies, most of which were invented by the English only 200 years ago.
Anyway, I stumbled onto the Burns page at Wikipedia whilst following various links as I do at 2AM. It would seem the same forces that invented the "traditions" also neutered Burns, the revolutionary republican, into a twice-a-year romantic devolutionist.
So dump your incorrect notions of Burns and start thinking about what he had to say.
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