Some have meat and cannot eat

Some cannot eat that want it,

But we have meat and we can eat

Sae let the Lord be thankit

THE Scots, even some Sassenachs, will recognise the lines above. It’s the Selkirk Grace, most familiarly dusted down on Burns Night and thus appropriately preceding today’s column. Burns Night was last Wednesday.

Whatever the cross-border equivalent of an Anglophile – a Scotiaphile? – that’s me.

With the possible exception of Cowdenbeath, I love every inch of the place. Love the Highlands and Islands, love the West Highland Railway, love the scotch pies – but not the scotch whisky – the banks and the braes and the Broons.

The disappointment some years ago at having to decline the chieftaincy of Newton Aycliffe Pipe Band – too much else on at the time – still skirls and swirls, still plays a lament.

That Burns wrote of the great chieftain of the pudding race is neither here nor there. Besides, he was addressing the haggis.

There was, however, an infamous early hours incident in Wick which was the closest I’ve come to spending a night in the cells.

Sharon Gayter, the extraordinary ultra-athlete from Guisborough, was two miles from completing a world record run from Penzance to John o’ Groats when the Backtrack column overtook her (in a taxi.)

It was getting on midnight. Though invited to hunker down in their support van, it seemed wiser to sleep walk around the great Burgh of Wick, thus ensuring the six o’clock train to start the long journey back south.

At 2am the Highland Constabulary approached, demanding to know what I was up to. “Waiting for a train,” I said.

The polis reacted like his helmet had been knocked agley by Oor Wullie’s catapult. How come a nation weaned on Robbie Burns has so little sense of humour?

BACK in 2002, I was a guest at the Lord Provost of Glasgow’s Burns Night dinner – fitting, the column observed at the time, for someone who had on several occasions come close to proposing holy matrimony to the beauteous railway from Glasgow to Mallaig.

The following evening was Darlington Gaelic Society’s do, the Immortal Memory proposed by the Rev Val Towler, a United Reformed Church minister from Hartlepool who based a brilliant speech on the premise that she’d been asked to address the Darlington Garlic Society.

Val promised to email a copy, her good intentions blocked by the internet service provider on the grounds that the message contained “rude words.”

It had never happened before, or has happened since. They took exception to cockaleekie.

THIS side of the border, Burns Night can become unnaturally expensive. A hotel near here offered dinner and bagpipes for £75, which seemed quite a lot for clapshot, champit potatoes and optional clootie dumpling.

Wetherspoons are cheaper, promoting not just Burns Night but Burns Week. In Bishop Auckland their pub’s called the Stanley Jefferson, after Stan Laurel, who spent about three months at the local grammar school but had a much greater affinity with Scotland.

After Bishop Auckland and North Shields, Stan’s dad became manager of the Metropole Theatre in Glasgow, a new blue plaque outside the tenement where they lived. Stan was 16 when he made his music hall debut at the Britannia Pronopticon, having illicitly borrowed his father’s best suit.

His jokes, say one of the websites, received a “steely” reception, probably a bit like Saturday night in Sunderland. Hurrying off stage, young Stan inadvertently fell over the old man’s breeks and went spectacularly A over T. A star was born.

Laurel and Hardy returned frequently to Scotland, made a silent movie in kilts and a talkie called Bonnie Scotland. There’s no record of Stan hasting back to Bishop.

The Stanley Jefferson offered haggis, neeps and tatties and a pint of Edinburgh Castle for £7 25. The haggis was OK, the neeps and tatties might most kindly be described as dour and more accurately as dire. Rabbie Burns (and probably Oor Wullie) would have played the de’il. Sassenachs say nowt.

SADLY coincidental, John Land’s funeral was held last Friday at St Thomas’s church in Cowshill – Heatherycleugh, officially – at yon end of Weardale.

John championed Bishop Auckland and Stan Laurel, helped form the local branch of the Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society – officially they’re The Sons of the Desert, John the first Grand Sheikh – was all-but omniscient on the Eden Theatre, which Arthur Jefferson managed.

A gentle, generous and urbane man, John had been a gaffer at the former Dufay Paints factory in Shildon before starting his own company. He produced several local histories of the Bishop Auckland and West Auckland areas and more recently helped promote Weardale after moving there.

He’d also written a history of the Eden, near which a statue of Stan Laurel stands, but it has yet to be published.

John was 85. Marie, his wife, was a journalist hereabouts and now runs a gemstone business in Stanhope. When John’s mum was 100, we joined them in a surprise helicopter trip over the North-East before a surprise lunch at Slaley Hall.

High up in the dale, if not in the lugubrious lowlands, it was a lovely winter morning. We adjourned to a classic little wake at Tiffy’s, across the road.

OLD Robbie was a rebel, a radical and, truth to tell, a bit of a rascal, too.

At a Burns-themed poetry evening last Wednesday, Barbara Hughes – belongs to Glasgow, lives in Richmond – told of a website which purports to establish Burns kinship with most of the known world, such his basket of illegitimate children. How more greatly it might have overflowed had not he died at 37?

Barbara loves him, posthumously, for all that. “He was very honourable, very quotable, very down to earth and recognised as a very good poet. Burns was a real Socialist, hated lairds and law makers.”

It was the monthly gathering of the Le Mondo Bongo poetry club at the Black Lion in Richmond, , hosted by a gentleman known as Rantin’ Richie who dressed a bit like him on that Cat Stevens LP cover.

The place overflowed, almost all English – perhaps they thought that Burns was George and Gracie – and no matter that some of the turns seemed themselves to have missed the connection.

OK, there was a poem called Hamish the Haggis and another called Gaberdine Angus, but that was about a dirty old man in a mac. They also sang Mexican Hat Dance and The Gas Man Cometh. Maybe it was Scottish Gas.

Barbara contributed Parcels of Rogues in a Nation – Burns meant the English – said that she’d tried to rescue his songs from the likes of Kenneth McKellar and Moira Anderson; Steve Wade, memorably, sang A Man’s A Man for A’ That, said to reinforce the bard’s Socialist credentials.

“Jeremy Corbyn,” he said, “should just adopt that and be done.”

FURTHER coincidence that we should find ourselves in Edinburgh last Thursday, the morning after the Burns Night before. Like Wetherspoons, Rose Street – the city’s carousing capital – had branded itself Red Red Rose Street and was trying to make a week of it. Perhaps hung over, Edinburgh seemed no longer to be interested. Ae fond kiss and then we sever; ae fareweel and then for ever.