Burns Lunch

It was a very smooth move to the new venue in the Bruce Hotel for East Kilbride Rotary Club. A good attendance, guests, enjoyable food and pleasant company was the ideal setting for our Friday Burns Lunch. Rotarian Roddy Shanks piped in the haggis carried on a silver salver by the chef. The Rotarians are fortunate to have Burns aficionado Ian Macpherson as a member of their club to perform the Address to the Haggis. As soon as Ian utters the words “Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face” the members know they are spectators to a superb delivery of the Address to the Haggis, full of theatrics, licking his fingers with the dews of the haggis and hacking it open with a ceremonial knife while the chef dodges Ian’s flourishes of the knife. After a tasty feed of Cock-a-leekie Soup followed with haggis neeps and tatties we settled down to a memorable recital of Tam o’Shanter. Donning his Tam-O-Shanter hat Ian launched into this extremely long Robert Burns epic poem of bousin at the nappy, swapping tales with his friend Souter Johnnie and culminating with Tam and his horse being chased by witches. This was brought to life with slides of wonderful caricatures of Tam, his friends, Maggie the mare and his sulky, sullen wife Kate. A very successful start to future lunches at our new venue.