January 25 is a very special date in the Scots’ calendar. It marks the birthday of our national bard, Robert Burns, born in humble circumstances 262 years ago.

I say Scots but, today, the celebration of Burns’s life and genius is a truly international occasion when thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of men, women and, indeed, children all round the world gather to pay tribute to him.

Or, at least, they do so in a normal year. 2021 is not a normal year, sadly. The curse of COVID-19 has made sure that this year’s celebrations will be much curtailed. So, it is perhaps a good time to take stock of why Burns is so important, not simply to the Scots but to so much of the world.

He was a great poet certainly and a fascinating character. But every other country has its literary giants. England holds no Shakespeare shindigs, Italy no Dante dinners, Russia no Pushkin purveys. So what makes Burns held in such affection?

Part of the answer lies in how we celebrate Burns’s birthday. It is not a Burns banquet or even a Burns dinner. It is, instead, a Burns supper, that intimate meal when family and close friends gather to enjoy each other’s company.

That reflects the person and the genius of Burns. He did not write for or about the rich and famous, nor for the powerful and the successful. He wrote for the honest, hard-working simple people he grew up with.

This is best shown by what happened on the night he died at the tragically young age of 37. As he lay dying in his home in the South Scotland town of Dumfries, a crowd of local people gathered to pay their respects and their last farewells. The story goes that one old woman in the crowd sobbed to her neighbours: “Who will write our poetry now?”

Our poetry!

Burns’s overwhelming love and language was meant for ordinary men and women. It is that love which – in normal times, at least – brings men and women in over 200 countries together in a great international chain of friendship and fellowship to honour his memory.

The centrepiece of every Burns supper is The Immortal Memory, the traditional toast to his genius. One of the best I have heard was proposed by a US air force colonel.

Burns’s overwhelming love and language was meant for ordinary men and women- Wylie Cunningham

Another key feature is the Toast to the Lassies, reflecting Burns’s passion for the fairer sex. The wittiest I have ever heard was given by an Irish Catholic priest!

As a young journalist, I even once attended a Burns supper conducted entirely in Hungarian. I admit that I didn’t understand very much of it but I was reliably informed I had enjoyed the night immensely.

As I have said, Burns did not write for the great and the good. When he did write about them, it was usually to mock their airs and graces and prevention: “Lord, an insect’s an insect at most: though it crawls on the curls of a queen.”

He wrote for the honest men and women. He wrote of the simple pleasures of good rustic food like Scotland’s traditional haggis, “warm, reeking, rich”. He wrote of the joys of an evening in the bar with close friends, “with reaming swats that drank divinely”. And he wrote of the equally common but less pleasurable experience of having to go home to face the wife, having spent rather too long in the bar – “our sulky sullen dame, gathering her brows like gathering storm, nursing her wrath to keep it warm”.

That last quote comes from Burns’s most famous poem Tam o’ Shanter. It is, of course, a ghost story and it is typical of his earthy approach that the witch that pursues Tam is no withered hag but an attractive lassie in a very revealing dress “in longitude though sorely scanty”.

Burns was at his best writing about love, from the enduring marriage of an elderly couple facing up to old age together in John Anderson, to the sadness of parting in Ae Fond Kidd as lovers are forced apart when one goes off to seek a better life in the New World. Such separation was an all too common tragedy in Scotland in Burns’s time. It is also a heartbreak shared by many – I suspect far too many – Maltese families over the years.

But I believe Burns would have been proud of the great contribution which the diaspora of our two small countries has made to the world. Because Burns was in his greatest moments a complete internationalist. In the words of my favourite poem: “It’s coming yet for a’ that; that man to man the world o’er; shall brothers be, for a’ that!”

In 2021, as we try to repair a world damaged by the havoc of the pandemic and as we Europeans have to deal with Perfidious Albion’s stupid decision to turn its back on the best prospect of true international partnership that this continent has yet achieved, we can only echo Burns’ s “then let us pray that come it may”.

Wylie Cunningham is a UK expatriate.