AS Burns Night approaches, Hugh MacDiarmid’s grave must disturb its neighbours with its rattling and shaking. It was he who declared that “the Burns cult must be killed stone dead”; and yet, almost a century later, adoration of the Bard continues undiminished. MacDiarmid sourly believed that “No’ wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote, but misapplied is a’body’s property”. That, however, is part of his charm. Setting aside his extraordinary talent, the Ayrshire poet’s greatest asset was being a working man. Never forgetting his origins, he had the popular touch.

At the Royal Scots Club Burns Supper in Edinburgh last week, I was sitting so close to the speakers’ platform that, when the Address to a Haggis was being performed, a piece of disembowelled haggis flew off the carving knife and landed on my arm. It was the best I’ve tasted in years.

This was as nothing, though, to a North Berwick event some time ago, where To A Mouse was declaimed with a real beastie, hired from a pet-shop, running around the speaker’s neck. The poor thing was timorous and cowering, but no more so than listeners near the front, who kept a hawk-like eye on the creature lest it made a bid for freedom and ran up their skirts.

Many of us at the club will have known only a few of Burns’s works, yet the room was packed to the rafters. The atmosphere was lively, growing more so as the wine flowed, but beneath it all was a deep sense of respect and sentimental attachment to a man who, had he been in the room, would have sat at the back, ordering another drink, ogling waitresses and scribbling a new song on his napkin.

Compared to many, I am a mere beginner at Burns Nights. Over the next couple of weeks Alasdair Hutton, who gave the Immortal Memory, will be, like Tam O’Shanter’s Meg, cantering all over the country. Come February GPs must immediately recognise those on the speaking circuit as they stagger into the surgery, looking not unlike a haggis themselves.

By the end of Mr Hutton’s talk, one of the reasons why Burns Night continues evergreen had become abundantly clear. The format and elements of the ceremony, as in any religious service, have their natural and inflexible order.

But the sermon, if you can call it that, is an opportunity to throw the pack into the air and watch the cards land in a new pattern.

Backed by careful research, Mr Hutton argued persuasively if controversially that Burns had ambitions to be a soldier. He was even given a military funeral as befitted one who had, briefly at least, taken up arms, despite apparently being clueless with a musket. When the speaker sat down, the Bard had been shown in a distinctly new light. It was also a reminder that he was like a weather vane, whose opinions could veer with changing political currents, or simply on a whim.

Shakespeare lovers must bitterly regret that their Bard left them so little to chew upon down the centuries. There are, it is said, only seven verifiable facts about Shakespeare, despite the hundreds of thousands of words he wrote. This no doubt explains why there is no such thing, to my knowledge, as a Shakespeare Supper. By contrast, regardless of his tragic death at 37, Burns lived and loved and wrote letters and poems and songs with such intensity that there is always something fresh to uncover or say about him. Even when hoary old facts are repeated, they can be given an original twist.

As I have witnessed, the ploughman poet has been claimed as a soulmate by Unionists and Nationalists alike. Unable to cry foul or protest that his words were taken out of context, his verse and his actions can be used to bolster most sides of a political argument short of extremist. He can also be held up as a paragon of undying attachment to his beloved Jean Armour, or as a dissipated “rooster”, as Muriel Spark rather approvingly called him. More militant women could easily build a case for him as the sort of lover to ruin a girl and give men a bad name.

With all these sides of his personality to consider, on my way to a Burns Supper I wonder what version of the man I will meet. One thing is usually certain. His feet of clay will have been cleaned up for the evening and stuffed into boots so brightly polished you can see your face in their reflection.

Yet, though his image is faithfully burnished for the anniversary, Burns’s best disciples would never claim he was perfect; how much less fascinating that would be. His drinking and womanising, volatility and vulgarity are part of who he was, as were his loyalty, humour, kindness, charisma, sense of duty, and endurance.

What his cheerleaders cannot abide on this of all nights is too much emphasis on the less edifying aspects of his behaviour. Nobody could be offended at a nod to his waywardness, but woe betide the unwary or heedless guest who misjudges the mood and overstates his shortcomings.

I have heard of Immortal Memories where the main speaker was lucky to escape without candlesticks and cutlery hurled at his head after denouncing Burns as a boozy, adulterous reprobate.

At one such event, a normally laid-back friend was so enraged by the sermoniser’s priggishness that he was restrained from leaping up in protest only by his wife grabbing onto the tails of his evening jacket. Keepers of Burns’s flame make Dan MacPhail of the Vital Spark look workshy and amateur. Throughout the year, they stoke and smoor, clean and oil the engines of his reputation with unquestioning devotion.

You might call them fundamentalists and you would be right. In their minds, Burns may not have been a saint but he has been proved immortal. The beliefs that underpin his veneration are humanitarian, thoughtful, mischievous and exemplified by a roaring love of being alive.

So I can understand the fury at anyone trying to dim the Bard’s lustre on his birthday. It is like badmouthing a groom at his wedding, or speaking harshly of the deceased at a wake. Though generally I do not warm to fundamentalism of any sort, I admire the poet’s staunchest followers. Unlike their religious counterparts, they do not try to squeeze the juice out of life until only a husk is left. Instead, they embrace the reckless and wild along with the good and glorious, knowing that, like their hero, we are all made of many parts.

And as everyone who reads Burns’s poetry knows, he still speaks to the world today. This year in particular, many within and beyond our border could do with this reminder:

“Then let us pray that come it may,

As come it will for a’ that,

That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth

Shall bear the gree, and a’ that.

For a’ that, and a’ that,

It’s comin’ yet for a’ that.

That Man to Man the warld o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.”