Beware of the Train

Thank God that's over.

Burns Night went pretty well in the end, though it got a bit stressful at times. I left the Damned Amateurs dress rehearsal after a mere two hours (just about enough time for a warmup :-) ) and legged it over to wormwood_pearl's gaff, expecting to find things well in hand, with haggis on the boil and her and susoeffl calmly chopping potatoes and debating how many candles to light. Alas, I'd underestimated the amount of preliminary deck-clearing there remained to do, and overestimated the amount of time they'd have to do it in. But after a couple of quick whiskies to steady my nerves and a couple of slower ones to help me size up the situation, I got things underway. Fortunately for us, our guests interpreted "7.30 for 8" as "8.30 for 9", and so it didn't matter too much that we only got the haggis on at 8. Everyone was very helpful and uncomplaining about being drafted in for food preparation duties, and several had brought extra haggis, sticky toffee pudding and the such. Sarah and John brought an entire cheeseboard, with biscuits and about six types of cheese! Shortly after 9 the haggis was ready, so we turned up the volume on Saor Patrol (the only CD of bagpipe music I own), then we carried the largest haggis out of the kitchen and back in again with great ceremony. Wormwood_pearl recited the Address to the Haggis with all the appropriate knife business, and the dinner was underway.

Most of the people I'd asked to do speeches had dropped out at the last minute (drat them!), so a lot of the toasts were extemporized. Also, none of us knew much about Burns' poetry, so we couldn't refer to it. Still, I was very impressed with Philipp's extremely funny Toast to Scotland, and Alan's short and to-the-point Toast to the Lassies: "To the lassies, without whom the human race would be screwed, and men wouldn't be!" Owing to wormwood_pearl being the only Scot present, and my being the only non-Scot drunk enough to attempt a Scottish accent, we didn't read much poetry either :-(

[Speaking of which, how the hell do you hold a Burns Night for 18 in Glasgow and only have one Scot turn up? We had one Swiss, one Taiwanese, one Northern Irish, two Southern Irish, one American, one New Zealander, nine English and one mongrel, but only one Scot. It's not as if I didn't invite more: they all dropped out, mostly at the last minute. Grrrrr.]

Still, I think it was a success. The next morning I was talking to Alan, who suggested that we should do more parties for other poets and literary figures:

"We could have a Sartre night, where you have to prove that your food exists before you can eat it!"
"Yeah, or a Dylan Thomas night, with liver and eighteen straight whiskies!"

Despite my skiving most of the dress rehearsal, the first Damned Amateurs show went pretty well too. We didn't have a running order for the games, so there was a bit of confusion towards the end when we weren't sure how much time we had or what games we had yet to play or how to end the thing, but the audience (which were slightly larger than the cast :-) ) seemed to enjoy themselves. We, of course, had great fun. I was giving serious thought to chucking my Saturday plans and doing the second show as well, but I'm glad I didn't, because Saturday was the kind of day hillwalkers don't dare to hope for. Mostly clear, with occasional light snow, we could see all around us for almost all of the day. We caught the train up to Tyndrum and climed Ben Challum, then went across the valley to an 800m hill on the other side. We got to the top of the hill as sun was setting - we'd have been a bit more worried if the route down wasn't fairly straightforward. But we got some utterly excellent views of the surrounding hills as the sun set - it seemed that every minute brought something new and more incredible. I took quite a few pictures with my shiny new digital camera (yay for insurance!), and will upload them soon, but for now, here's one I took with my phone. The mountain with the beam of light coming out of it is Ben Lui.