Scots whisky distillers Auchentoshan are suggesting their customers hold “a Burns Night with a difference” later this month, by staging a series of events at bars and restaurants across the UK entitled “Auchentoshan Presents… A William McGonagall Burns Supper”.
Promising an evening of “Poetry, Whisky, Haggis and general Mayhem”, they’ve published a do-it-yourself kit which includes menus, place settings, invites and suggested readings should you want to stage a Burns/McGonagall supper in your own home.
I must say that some of their accompanying notes really put the “tosh” in Auchentoshan:
William McGonagall and Robert Burns were both poets that lived and worked in Scotland in the early 1800s. The pair were famously arch enemies as Burns was a traditionalist yet McGonagall was a renegade. Auchentoshan’s McGonagall Burns Supper is to celebrate McGonagall’s flair for challenging perceptions of poetry.
More than a few factual errors in there! They actually worked at different ends of the 19th century, and McGonagall was a great admirer of Burns’ work. Still, it’s good to see anything which raises the profile of the Poet & Tragedian – even if it’s a pretty thinly disguised attempt to sell more of the demon drink!
