STN CDR’S COINS BURNS NIGHT

The Warrant Officers’ and Sgts’ Mess and Halton House Officers’ Mess celebrated a braw combined Dining In Night for Burns Night to celebrate the life and poetry of Robert Burns.

Affectionately known as Rabbie, Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in a village in Ayrshire in Scotland. He was born on a farm, and as he grew up, he discovered a love of reading and writing. He published his first collection of poems in the summer of 1786 and published many more famous rhymes including ‘To a Mouse’, ‘Address to a

Haggis’ and ‘Selkirk Grace’. He died in 1796, aged just 37 years old, however left behind a huge legacy and is considered to be Scotland’s national poet, or to use the term known in medieval Celtic culture as a storyteller, verse maker and composer: ‘Bard’.

Traditional speeches were delivered throughout the Burns Supper of haggis, tatties and neeps including Selkirk Grace by Rev’d (Sqn Ldr) Michael McCormick and Address to the Haggis by Sgt Paul Topping. Supper was followed by traditional Ceilidh dancing which carried on into the late, late evening.

Padre Mitchell

On the slope of Long’s Peak in Colorado, lies the ruin of a gigantic tree. Scientists tell us that it had stood there for over four hundred years. It was a mere sapling when Christopher Columbus left Spain and crossed the Atlantic in 1493. It was only half grown when the Pilgrims Fathers arrived in the Mayflower and settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.

During the course of its long life this tree was struck by lightning on no less than fourteen occasions. It was engulfed by innumerable avalanches, descending from the mountain tops. Being in a valley it experienced a great many storms, which thundered past in its four centuries of life.

But such was its resilience and its inner strength, that it survived them all. In the end however, the tree’s undoing was far less significant. An army of beetles attacked the tree and levelled it to the ground. The insects ate their way through the bark and gradually destroyed the inner strength of the tree, by their tiny, but incessant attacks.

So a giant forest tree in Colorado which age had not withered, nor lightning blasted, nor avalanches ripped down, nor storms subdued. Fell at it’s last, before beetles so small that a person could crush them, between their forefinger and their thumb.

Aren’t we all like that battling giant of the forest? Don’t we manage somehow to survive the rare storms and avalanches and lightning blasts of life, only to let our hearts be eaten out by little beetles of worry— little beetles that could be crushed between a finger and a thumb?

Let’s not allow ourselves to be upset by small things, which threaten to invade our consciousness, but let us remember, “Life is too short to be little”as former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said. Live for today, for it is the only day that we can live.