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Packed with mouthwatering recipes such as skirlie, clapshot, and champit tatties with syboes, this braw book also includes poetry and comments from all the family. It contains photos showing how the family have celebrated the national event over the years. This unique scrapbook-style format contains an essay about Burns night by Horace, years of Broons’ Burns Night memories, family snaps, poems and comments from all the family and Maw’s special Burns Night recipes

250 years of Robert Burns

25 January 2009 will mark 250 years to the day since Scotland's national poet was born.

Born in Alloway, Ayrshire in 1759 into fairly humble circumstances, Robert received a certain amount of schooling and was well read for a boy of his background. He began his working life as an apprentice flax-dresser in Irvine, Ayrshire, but after his father died he worked the family farm along with his brother, Gilbert.

In 1786 he had published, in Kilmarnock, a first collection of poems: Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which made him an overnight success. He went to Edinburgh where he was well received by the polite society of the day (though Burns' personality did not always sit well with that world).

As well as poetry, Burns is well known for his songs, and his contributions to George Thomson's A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice and James Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum have perhaps contributed more to his 'Immortal Memory' around the world; the most famous being, 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose', 'Ae Fond Kiss' and of course, 'Auld Lang Syne', sung at Hogmanay.

In 1789, having spent most of the wealth from his published poetry, he began work as an Excise Officer in Dumfries (an irony not lost on him) and resumed his relationship with wife Jean. His increasingly radical political views influenced many of the phenomenal number of poems, songs and letters he continued to pen, including such famous works as For a' that and a' that.

He died on 21 July in 1796 in Dumfries at the age of 37, his life foreshortened by drink and poor health, and leaving a widow, Jean Armour, and a large family. A memorial edition of his poems was published to raise money for his wife and children.

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