Page 530 - The Secret Museum

beloved writer. This room isn’t usually open to the public, but the library does rent it

out for lectures.

On show in the Burns Room was the earliest score for ‘Auld Lang Syne’ that they
own, in that version the tune was more nostalgic, while the one we know now is
more assertive and confident. The modern tune is still poignant, but it doesn’t set
everyone off crying at midnight each year, as the old one might have. The version we
use is more suggestive of good times gone, and to come, and of the freedom of the
human spirit.

Of course, Robert Burns isn’t only celebrated on New Year’s Eve. There is Burns
Night on 25 January, that wonderful evening on which people gather together, to eat

haggis (or to look at haggis and ask, ‘What is in it?’) and then read his poems aloud
to one another while drinking whisky. Burns is also to be celebrated for giving us a
word that rhymes with purple. In the last verse of a letter to Elizabeth Scott, a
Scottish poetess, Burns wrote:

I’d be mair vauntie o’ my hap,
Douce hingin’ owre my curple
Than ony ermine ever lap,
Or proud imperial purple.

Which roughly translated means, Burns would rather wear plaid over his buttocks

than any ermine or posh purple cloth. Curple, in this instance, is his bottom.

People often call Burns ‘Rabbie’, but he never signed his name as Rabbie, Robbie
– or, indeed, ‘Bobbie’ Burns, as some Americans call him. His signatures included
‘Robert’, ‘Robin’ and, on at least one occasion, ‘Spunkie’. Neither did he ever wear
a kilt, because kilts were outlawed after the Jacobite Rebellion and, if Robert Burns
had put one on, he, like all Scots who wore one, would risk deportation.

But, of course, Burns’s most famous work is the song we all sing in the first
moments of each year: ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Next New Year’s Eve, when you begin
singing, ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never called to mind,’ you might

remember the piece of paper that lives quietly, in a foamy bed inside a briefcase, in
the library in Glasgow. I know I will.