Joe Campbell, Honorary President of the Robert Burns World Federation, will be in Fort Collins, Colorado: “I’m going there to do the Immortal Memory for a man called Tom Sutherland, a professor of animal sciences who went to America to study in 1951 and took a post in the American University of Beirut and was kidnapped by an Islamic group and held for six-and-a-half years in captivity. He came out and said that Burns had helped him through that period of absolute awful, mental
torture, because he remembered all the poems from his childhood. He remembered never despair, never ever despair.”
Fergus Muirhead, Vice-President of Barcelona Burns Club, will be in Viladrau, a village north-west of Barcelona. “Eight or ten ex-patriot Scots living in Barcelona have celebrated Burns’ life in each other’s houses. Last year we took it a stage further and we had a supper in Viladrau, and the main course there was wild boar and chestnut casserole.”
“I’ll probably be celebrating it with a whisky in a pub,” says John Ross, comedian. “Some pub up the West End maybe, where I live, quite close by, so I don’t have far to walk home.”
“I’ll have various speeches on,” says historian David Ross. “It always amazes me the amount of talent on show. Some guy who works at a lathe at the Rolls-Royce during the week and he gets up and for one night he can be the bard.”
A TOAST TO THE LEGEND:
- Burns Supper: key elements part 1
- Burns Supper: key elements part 2
- For more Burns info vsit www.rbwf.org.uk, www.rabhas.com and www.santjordigolf.com/en/Burns-Club
