NEXT Wednesday, the 25th, is Burns Night, an annual world-wide celebration of Scotland’s famous bard’s birthday in 1759.
It’s usually a formal occasion, meaning the full dress bit in your family tartan or if you’re not of Scottish descent, a borrowed one.
There’s plenty of Burns involved, quite naturally, including his Address to the Haggis, and many other speeches, some serious, some light-hearted.
There are pipes and Highland dancing, and of course, lots of haggis and whisky.
All in all a lot of fun, but of course, if you’re not going to a formal occasion, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t celebrate Robbie Burns at home, we certainly do.
In another time, long ago, the radio station I worked for used to broadcast live to most of the English-speaking world, the Burns Night celebrations from the Ball Room at the Wanderers Club in Johannesburg.
Resplendent in a dress suit (I’m a Sassenach) I would cue the start of the Grand March, the guests of honour led by a piper, and then do a running commentary on the celebrations.
It was all enormous fun and was much appreciated by our almost worldwide audience.
Here’s another southern African link to the UK.
As part of the marking of the centenary of the First World War and a little over 70 years since the end of the Second World War, a full-scale replica of the famous Spitfire fighter is to be given to Lesotho to thank that country for the contribution it made during the Battle of Britain.
The battle was fought from July to October 1940, when the RAF fought the German Luftwaffe for the control of the skies over Britain.
Tribal chiefs in what was then the British Protectorate of Basutoland raised £100 000 for the purchase of 17 Spitfires that fought in the Battle of Britain as the Basutoland Squadron, Squadron 72.
And this one is especially for those of you getting ready to go back to work.
Scientists in Britain say sitting at a desk in the office all day can be harmful to your health.
An article in the medical journal, Lancet, quotes researchers saying that an 18-year study of a million office workers, most of them over the age of 45, has shown that those who sit at an office desk all day without doing any exercise have a higher mortality rate than those office workers who get an hour or more of exercise a day.
The researchers also said that watching three hours of television a day could be harmful to your health too, unless you did lots of exercise as well.
They did not say what would happen if you watched television at the office.
Finally, also harmful to your health can be filling in your tax forms — a railway worker in Bristol in England has received a tax bill for R238-trillion.
He’s contesting it, naturally, and says that on his pay as a signal tester it will take him 369-million years to pay it off.
It is not reported whether Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs service has reacted.
Source” The Week: The Best of the British and Foreign Media.
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