Duncan Harley

Celebrated each year on January 25 th  Burns night is an annual Scottish fixture extraordinaire. The supermarket shelves are full of the traditional and, of course, essential accompaniments to the bard’s memory. Not perhaps for the faint hearted, the haggis features strongly on eye-level shelves and on the dinner tables of those who choose to recall the impact the bard had on the folklore of the Scottish Nation. In his short time on this earth, Burns commented on every subject known to man at that time - from winsome witches to wee timorous beasties. He even inspired an Inverbervie born ship-designer to name The Cutty Sark in his memory. Robert Burns was of course almost certainly a fan of a dram as this extract from John Barleycorn clearly illustrates: “John Barleycorn was a hero bold, Of noble enterprise; For if you do but taste his blood, 'Twill make your courage rise. 'Twill make a man forget his woe; 'Twill heighten all his joy; 'Twill make the widow...

Alongside the fear of having committed unwitting criminality as regards the penning of prose, one of a writer’s greatest fears is that the slaved-over book will never sell. Yes, we all know about James Joyce who penned the book we all aspire to understand, is now dead but graces every coffee table in the land. ‘Is that a good read then?’, ‘Oh yes, I particularly like his comments on Bono. Mind you I feel sorry for the Irish.’ Then there is that splendid Harry Potter franchise and of course the tales of the heroic David Toulmin who was first published some 25 years before his unpleasant death. In the big scheme of things however, literary fame comes in small doses and as in the case of famous artists, often arrives late in life or even afterwards. I was however pleased to read a fine piece in yesterdays Sunday Post about Dundee bard Michel Marra. The Post is not my favourite tabloid and nor is it a paper I buy every week. But, as has often been the case recently, I half expected a...