AS a boy frae Bank Street that flirted with the bewitchment of Bishopbriggs before returning to the croissant-cosseted confines of the Glasgow's west end, it takes a lot tae get me tae that south side. Yet this Saturday that is exactly where I’ll be: on Glasgow's south side, surrounded by the most august company.

Only the brilliance of our Bard could convey me contentedly across the Kingston Bridge to that ghetto of grandeur they call Giffnock. I’ll pure tear intae ma haggis, leave the car at hame and enjoy the quality uisge beatha.

I’ve been asked tae toast the lassies; I love being asked tae do this. Burns is greatly misunderstood when it comes to women. No doubt he loved them, frequently. But I think he also understood them in a way many men today fail to. There is some conjecture that he was the first male to write from a woman’s perspective. Apart from being a brilliant poet, conflicted thinker and pioneer of Romanticism, he crucially collected and collated many of the old songs of Scotland creating the first library of our literature. There’s no doubt, I pure love a guid Burns supper. And my reasons extend far beyond simply loving the Bard.

Forgive me, reader, but there’s every chance that I might irritate you with that which I am about to say. Since 1603, Scotland has been the victim of cultural colonisation by our bigger, brasher, bully-some neighbour. I am only too aware that some may find my language rather extreme. It isn’t. I believe it is written in our history and has inveigled its way into our collective consciousness.

Don’t misunderstand me; Scotland enjoyed and made the most of many opportunities through those centuries. Glasgow became the second city of empire. While many English folk were unkeen to leave home, Scots were willing to travel the globe to administer the ever-growing empire. These Scots were pivotal in the prosperity purloined from all that was pink on the globe.

But alongside such prosperity our Highlands were cleared, our kilts curtailed and the use of the Scots language frowned upon. Many Scots writers also adopted English noms de plume to ease their way through London life. The very notion of “Scottishness” became a tad taboo; even the great David Hume considered himself Northern British as opposed to Scottish. (He changed his name from “Home” to facilitate correct pronunciation by the English as well as publishing the six-volume opus, The History Of England; safe to say Home/Hume was an Anglophile.)

I grew up in the 1970s. While Scottish schools had Shakespeare as mandatory texts, there were very few of our own writers on the syllabus. We read one Burns poem, My Heart's In The Highlands. We read it for fun, never to be examined on. (The poem was written in English; only now do I realise that we never read very much Scots growing up.) That was the impact on Rabbie Burns on our lives. The rest of the world did better …

Over a century ago the intelligentsia of Bengal, led by the great Rabindranath Tagore, were inspired by our Bard; all Canadian universities mark Burns’s birthday as well as there being wider celebrations amongst the Scots Canadians on the east coast; great American novelists pay him homage by naming their novels after his verse (Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men); even the Russians elevated him to “people’s poet” and honoured him with a commemorative stamp. Excepting religious figures and royalty, I doubt there are many more statues erected to anyone in the English-speaking world.

While every school pupil in England will study at least two of Shakespeare’s plays, only since devolution has Scotland woken up from its cultural dwam and engaged more with our own heritage. What devolution started slowly, the independence referendum propelled powerfully.

I ask you this. We fixate on the Union as being the defining treaty in our history. Yet how many of our weans know of the “Auld Alliance”, a treaty thus described by De Gaulle: “where for five centuries the destiny of France was at stake, there were always men of Scotland to fight side by side with men of France, and what Frenchmen feel is that no people has ever been more generous than yours with its friendship”.

So on Saturday night, there I’ll be on the south side. I’ll have nine yards of Punjabi cotton carefully wrapped roond ma heid; I’ll have nine yards of the finest Scottish tartan around ma hips; and I’ll raise a glass in toast not just to the lassies but to our history, our culture and our future. It’s time we all started tae realise and recognise all that we might achieve. O, wad some Power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!