I AM grateful to Brodie Hepburn from Ballatur for a letter of support. He thinks we might be twins separated at birth. He, too, has friends who have forgotten the connection between Jesus of Nazareth and what some people with crushing honesty now prefer to call "the midwinter break".

I AM grateful to Brodie Hepburn from Ballatur for a letter of support. He thinks we might be twins separated at birth. He, too, has friends who have forgotten the connection between Jesus of Nazareth and what some people with crushing honesty now prefer to call "the midwinter break".

Brodie writes that we have "identical Christmas card analysis (four for Jesus, 11 for robins, 70 for hedonism) and I am pleased I'm not the only grumpy old man who is glad it's all over; at least I avoid the Burns circuit".

He would have had no such luck had he lived in Methlick, the last village before you enter the Black Earldom of Buchan. This year we had no fewer than four Burns suppers. The poor old dears had hardly recovered from their orgy of six turkey and plum duffs in eight days when they had four sets of haggis, tatties and neeps to get through.

That is an extraordinary change in my lifetime. When I was a lad, there was no such thing as Burns suppers, well not in Methlick anyway, and not for 10 miles roon.

We got Tam o' Shanter and To A Mouse at school. I sang Ca' the Ewes Tae the Knows at a music festival in Aberdeen in 1950. There was quite a bit of Burns but no Burns suppers.

I don't know why but there are two things I think contribute to an explanation. The first is the relative weakness of the masons in the north-east.

Burns went about as high as you can go in the masons and a lot of the biggest Burns suppers are held to honour a fellow mason as much as Scotland's finest poet. We don't have a lodge but what we do have is a curling club which partly fills that side of manhood - the desire to have our own thing and for rituals.

The other reason why haggis suppers were less popular in the north-east from early times to perhaps the nineties is that we have our own body of poetry, and of music which some will recognise if we attach "Bothy" or "Doric" to it.

We don't have our own ploughman-poet like Robert Burns, just our due share of the Bard as fellow Scots. But the Bothy stuff is not inconsiderable if you let us put up our best man for each of Robbie's talents.

George Bruce Thomson's trilogy of comic verse, Mcfarlane o' the Sprots, McGinty's Meal and Ale, and the Weddin' o' Macginnis may be mentioned in the same breath as Tam o' Shanter.

In Flora Garry and Charles Murray we have considerable poets who, if not a whole supper, deserve at least a course each.

And the ballads, the Bonnie Lass o Fyvie, Mormond Braes and Farewell to Tarwathie (and a hundred more) perhaps lack an icon like My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose but there is a huge body of beautiful folksong.

Within 25 miles of Methlick there is the biggest concentration of English language folksong in the world.

Don't get me wrong. I am all in favour of celebrating the Bard with a haggis and a dram or two, but next year, I propose that Methlick cuts down to three Burns suppers and has instead of the fourth, one Doric dinner. Methlick Doric Dinner 2009 order of service: the Strichen Grace - "Rubbits young, rubbits auld, rubbits het and rubbits caul, Rubbits tender, rubbits teuch, thank the Lord we hae eneuch."

Soup. Tatties. Mince and Tatties, served with breid (oatcakes) and pickled beetroot. Milk pudding and rhubarb jam (made with plenty of ginger). Toast to the Plough. The main toast to last much less than forty-five minutes.

Toast to Provost Davidson and the Heroes of Harlaw.

Provost Davidson remains the only civic leader to die in defence of his city. He led the Burghers of Aberdeen out to the field of Harlaw near Inverurie where they defeated the numerically far stronger Highland Host in 1411, securing for the north-east its place in the Lowlands.

Instead of Holy Willie's Prayer, we will have a local worthy (the more pompous the better) up in balcony in a toga reciting Charles Murray's wonderful satire, "Gin I were God."

For Tam o' Shanter, we'll have Ian Middleton's comic poem, "Auld Davie's Draars"

And we'll finish with folk songs and the fiddle music of Scott Skinner, until the cows come home.

But that's next year. This year the Farmer was proposing the immortal memory of Robert Burns at Kennethmont. I had explained to the chairman that I really didn't know enough to speak for 45 minutes on the Bard, but he said it would be alright as long as I mentioned Robbie "now an then".

The Farmer more or less got away with it and he had a grand suggestion. Instead of toying with stuff about sending the English home to think again we should adopt as our national anthem Burns' wonderfully optimistic, non-belligerent and outward looking ballad, "A Man's a Man for Aa That".

There would really be no argument were it not for the politically incorrectness of praising "man" and forgetting "woman". It would need to be "a person's a person for aa" and there's nae smack tae that.

But that is plain wrong. My dictionary gives the definition of man as "member of the species Homo". As such, women are securely included.