Dalbeattie Burns Club holds 64th Burns Supper

Dalbeattie Burns Club held its 64th Burns Supper in the town hall on Friday night.

It attracted 110 members keen to celebrate the first gathering for three years due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Following an excellent four-course meal provided by the local team of Caterbirds, president Gordon Cathro presided over an evening of celebration and entertainment.

The music was supplied by the fine tones of John Caskie with accordion accompaniment from Bob Watson while the club piper of many years, Alister McCubbin, made the roof and rafters “ding” as he piped in the haggis to be addressed by Glenkens farmer Robert McTurk.

Robert McTurk addresses the haggis (Bobby Geddes)

He also offered two tour de forces in the course of the evening in his recitals of The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Tam O’Shanter.

Peter Kormylo, drawing upon his love of the poet and of his own ancestral homeland of Ukraine, gave a deeply knowledgeable and emotional tribute to Burns in his Immortal Memory.

Graham Bell from Castle Douglas was warmly welcomed and appreciated for his witty Toast to The Lasses.

Fraser Sanderson, summoned from the substitutes’ bench at the last minute to cover an enforced gap in the programme, brought the evening to a rousing close with his Toast to The Drouthy Cronies.

All in all, an evening on which “kings may be blest” but Dalbeattie Burnsians were “glorious, O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious!”.