Inventory

It’s Burns Day today and across the world people are celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth. The Scottish Sunday’s are featuring the anniversary, and a swift look through the online versions produced this from the The Sunday Herald's article about what Burns means to some prominent Scots.

http://www.sundayherald.com/arts/arts/display.var.2484323.0.0.php

‘Jings, crivvens, help ma boab'

Alex Salmond approached DC Thomson’s Sunday Post, about appearing in The Broons as a way of promoting the Homecoming 2009. Oor Eck is joined in 10 Glebe Street by that Brown laddie from 10 Downing Street, for Ma Broon’s Burns Supper.

There is no link to this as it’s not online, and it might go too far against the grain to buy the Sunday Post and view it in person, but I may give in and pop out the newsagent later.

My own experience of Burns today is summed up by his lines penned “in answer to a mandate by the surveyor of taxes, requiring a return for the assessed taxes.”* In other words, self assessment looms in this final effort to make bureaucracy's deadline.

The Inventory

Sir, as your mandate did request,
I send you here a faithfu’ list
O’ guids and gear, and a’ my graith,
To which I’m clear to gie my aith.

Burns

I’ve enjoyed my explorations of his oeuvre and thought it worth while recording a few words about the book I’ve been using. I was given this book, along with several others, by my great aunt and uncle when I was learning about Burns at primary school, (as probably everyone of my age group did at that time). The book had belonged to their daughter Alice who won it for coming 1st in the Burns Competition of 1933.

Tragically, Alice was killed in a road accident before even reaching her teens. I felt privileged then, and still do, to have been entrusted with her small library and have always treasured it.

This old book was part of a series published as the Chandos Classics and despite a bit of a search online, only one reference to it turned up in the catalogue of an American bookseller: http://www.gsbbooks.com/cgi-bin/gsb455/9845.html?id=cykysWMP

Description
London: Frederick Warne, [ca. 1870-1885]. 8vo, contemporary red morocco, gilt turn-downs, gilt lettering, a.e.g., 614 pages. Frontis portrait. Published in Warne's Chandos Poets series.

The print is tiny and almost defeats the magnification of even my strongest reading glasses, but for all the squinting and peering it has been worth investigating Burns in more depth for this month.

I cannot help but reflect on what the long deceased Alice would have made of my use of her book for a blog as that very likely would have been unimaginable to a 1930’s Edinburgh girl. All the same, as a relative, I'd like to think of her as a bit of a kindred spirit, as her parents were certainly not conformist or stuffy in any way even though their (to me) genteel Scottish background would have suggested otherwise.

*This is the introduction to The Inventory in Alice's book.