TODAY, January 25th, is Burns Day, the anniversary of the birth in 1759 of the Scottish national poet Robert Burns. The evening is traditionally marked in his native country by great feasting, enthusiastic drinking, and many helpings of haggis to repeated renderings of Auld Lang Syne. This year the celebrations will be even more exuberant than usual, since as everyone must know by now, 1996 is also the bicentenary of Burns's early death he died of rheumatic heart disease on July 21st, 1796.
Rabbie's life was short, but very full. As one biographer engagingly has put it "His attractive appearance and gregarious temperament led him to a life of dissipation and amorous complexity". And indeed he was not averse to a meteorological metaphor or albeit heavily disguise in his native Scottish idiom, to explain the difficulties such a life might bring
Wi' wind and tide fair i' your tail
Right on ye scud your sea way,
But in the teeth o' baith to sail,
It mak's an unco leeway.
Love borne in the air was another one of Rabbie's themes.
Of a the airts the wind can blaw,
I dearly like the west.
he tells us and then, as one might expect of a man who has been compared to Rabellais there is a femme to be cherche
For there a bonnie lassie lives,
The lassie I lo`e best
But Burns has a much more recent link with meteorology. Six years ago on January 23rd, 1990, a shallow area of low pressure appeared on our weather maps off the eastern seaboard of the United States. During the following two days, it deepened explosively as it moved across the Atlantic. By the time it reached these parts on the morning of January 25th it had a central pressure of 950 hPa, and the winds raging around it produced gusts to over 100 mph.
The storm crossed Ireland during the morning, and moved over Scotland in the early afternoon. Before the day was done, the Burns Day Storm, as it is called, had caused 47 deaths and damage amounting to several million pounds. Strangely enough, Rabbie in his own enigmatic way, seemed to have forecast precisely such a happening
Was five and twenty days begun
`Twas then a blast o' Janwar Win'
Blew hansel in on Robin