…Robert Burns and Sir Winston Churchill… iconic maverick role models…

….hadn’t noticed the date proximity before… Robert Burns was born on January 25th, 1759… 206 years later, all but a day, Sir Winston Churchill died on January 24th, 1965… by any measure, two monumental figures on the stages of their respective WURLDS… Burns, a poor poet farmer who is revered, particularly in Scotland, but also remembered annually at Burns Supper dinners all around the planet has left an ageless literary legacy… this ol’ Jurassic was privileged last night to deliver the keynote Immortal Memory Toast on Burns at a supper in Bahrain… and this afternoon, I watched on television the memorial service taking place in London of the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Churchill… arguably the greatest statesman ever, making many of us of a certain age hanker for more of his ilk and status to replace the slates of political charlatans posing in so many national governments today… I have been a lifelong idoliser of Sir Winston Churchill, as many of yeez Lads and Lassies who follow my blog may recall, and wanted to meet the great man (I’ll defer that get-together for as long as I can now, Mabel)… and lest it be forgotten, in 1953, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his remarkable four-volume, A History of the English Speaking Peoples… Nobel Prizes were first presented in 1895, but I’ve no doubt that if they had been around in the days of Burns, he too, would have been a worthy and deserving recipient… further links between these men are easy to identify… Burns has great allure for his fundamental premise that all men are created equal, and his hope that one day, ‘man to man the world o’er, will brithers be for ‘a that’… Churchill’s more recent crusade in the last century to ensure the freedom of all peoples are well documented… these men are conjoined in essence in their railing against the separate tyrannies they saw in their lifetimes—Burns against the poverty of the common man, Churchill for the right of all men to be free… it occurs to me that p’raps I’m not alone in having as hero figures those who tend not to follow the absolute norms… both these greats had their detractors, and sometimes with good reason, for their personal lives’ activities and principles (Burns fathered more than a dozen children by five different women… Churchill erred massively in his treatment of the Irish and in his First World War decision at Gallipoli)… regardless, two more pronounced examples are hard to find… Robert Burns and Sir Winston Churchill… iconic maverick role models… would that we had more of their kind around today… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

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