12:24 a.m. - 2003-01-26
Scots Wha Hae
A year ago, I was working late at the company I was contracted to at the time, because of some deadlines we had to meet. All of a sudden I heard this very strange wailing sound coming out of the vents. I thought I was hearing things, so I stepped out of my office to check if it was being heard by any one else. Thoughts of 9/11 briefly flitted through my mind, but I dismissed those - this sounded more like ghosts than bombs. Found someone else around and they could hear the sounds too, but it was only audible in the offices on the west side of the building. Turned out it was the bagpipes - someone on another floor was having the haggis piped in at work - in an American company forbye! Then it dawned on me, it was Robbie Burns birthday, www.rabbie-burns.com,- you know, the poet who wrote Auld Lang Syne, Ode to a Mouse - "the best laid plans of Mice and Men gang oft agley"?
Anyway being a good Scots lass by ancestry, I celebrated his birthday in proper style today. No, that does not mean eating Haggis - every culture has it's mistakes too. I watched Sean Connery movies. Finding Forrester and First Knight are a couple of my favorites. At one large company where I worked, one of the senior scientists was the spitting image of Sir Sean - sounded like him too. I had the distinct pleasure of being in an office just down the hall from him, so I could look and listen to my heart's content. He was married, but I really only wanted the vicarious experience anyway. I worked on his material from time to time and it was a fascinating experience to see how someone, who really is good at what they do, thinks things through on paper. I learned a lot from his material.
I had found a newsletter from Scotland,www.scotlandonline.com,earlier this year that has all sorts of interesting information, including recipes for traditional Scots dishes - smoked salmon and scones being more to my taste. Found the family tartan - all three versions, a link dedicated to Scotch whiskey, another to golf courses, one or ten for sports, a live cam of Loch Ness searching for Nessie, www.scotlandonline.com/webcams, and, of course, a story or two about Robbie Burns. Quite the character he was. It had an ancestry/geneology link that I'll spend some time digging through at a later date. My grandmother was born in Glasgow and lived in the parish of Bothwell Hants. My Dad has her birth certificate, listing her family tree back three or four generations, so I have a bit of data to work with - should be interesting. Then all I've got to do is convince my sons that wearing a kilt is cool. After all there is Mel Gibson in Braveheart, and Adrain Paul in the Highlander, what more needs to be said?
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