Skip to main content

The drunk man looks at Simon Heffer

Today is the 250th aniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, but in response to this tosh from Simon Heffer, I prefer to use the style of Hugh McDairmid:

Nae fie in times a war an' financial exigency
tae hear yon scunner roar oot his ain bile.
Ilka the fear marks oot the cauf forby
The mistakes a' his ain fowk he seeks to force upon anither.


By fit richt hae he to talk?
For aye his quine, the blessed Margeret,
Presumed tae lecture Scots?
An' that impiety took place wi'in a Kirk!


In fit miekle mind can aye hatred o' five million hide?
Fae meikle nonesense fit muckle rang and richt may find.
An' a' we ken the guineas stamp wiz but the rank
forby the gaud hae gone awry.


An' aye the list is muckle lang fae a' hae trod on Scotland's dignity
fae England's metropolitan toon.
Noo we ken the truth:
Yon portly scunner hae nicht ony word tae say

Scots a' nae sicht rustic fowk

Comments

Wyrdtimes said…
That's mainly gibberish as far as I'm concerned but I guess it's supposed to be right?

"Scots have brought Britain to its knees" I take it you don't think so? It sure as hell looks like it to me.

Good in the long run as hopefully it will ratchet up justified English resentment towards righteous anger and action.

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...

Are the Liberal Democrats Libertarian?

A few days ago Cicero met with one of the better known figures in the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Mickelthwait . Brian writes for various blogs that I enjoy reading- including Samizdata . Ahead of our meeting Brain expressed "scepticism" about the Libertarian credentials of the Liberal Democrats: "My charge was that when you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe. The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear. But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear. So don't vote for these lying creeps." Political parties- all of them- are coalitions of people who quite often disagree with each other. Apparently we are not supposed to "air our dirty linen in public", but actually one of the reasons that the Liberal Democrats appealed to me was that they were prepared to talk about issues and policies amongst themselves in public. The eclipse of the Liberal Party...