River Forth Rising & Burns night

After a night and day of heavy rain the pedestrian underpass into town is flooded and the river opposite our house is rising worryingly high...
The storm damage to the trees in front of the rugby club happened a few weeks ago when the wind also blew the roof off a local primary school and overturned a lorry on the M9. Apparently the rugby club across the river from us was badly flooded in December 2006 - it is very close to the river as you can see. This is part of the view we have from our house - sometimes it's so misty you can't see the hills at all. The view is always changing.
The photo taken from our garden shows how close the river is and how high it is getting- might be spending the weekend evacuating our belongings from our one-storey bungalow at this rate! We've been assured by our letting agent that the house has never flooded before (and they never lie to us- ha ha). You can just see a hazy Wallace Monument in the background of the photo.

Burns' Night Supper
25th January was the birthday of Robert Burns so we celebrated a day early at a friend's house in Menstrie with a meal of a huge haggis (traditional and vegetarian - no prizes for guessing which one I had but Michael wimped out and had the same as me!), a good single malt Scottish whisky (Clynelish) and a fantastic bottle of red wine from Catalunya (so smooth - called Abadal), 1 of around only 4000 bottles made per year, courtesy of one of the guests who is a wine maker from near Barcelona (NB it's true what they say about not mixing grape and grain!).

A photo of our host Ailsa slicing the traditional haggis - mm, look at that lovely sheep's stomach- you can see the veins!

It was an international gathering of several Catalan people, Scots, English and Ghanaian people. Our collective effort at reciting Ode to a Haggis was amusing but not as good as this one from YouTube, which very handily also provides the modern day translation: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3kzYaIphbzU

We Scots thought Scotland was doing quite well to have 2 main languages (English and Gaelic) however that paled in comparison when we heard that Spain has 5 official languages and Ghana has about 45! One of the group from Barcelona knew far more about Scottish history and literature than we did cos he lectures in Scottish literature at the university - it turns out our romantic ideal of Burns as a poetry-wrting farm labourer wasn't exactly right since he did actually go to university! It takes a Spanish man to come and teach us!