Last updated 21:54, Wednesday, 28 May 2008

NEXT time I’m in Edinburgh I must pay a visit to a certain Indian restaurant, if only to view the menu offered in Scots.

Edinburgh’s Suruchi restaurant is introducing Scotland’s first fully live, on-line Indian take-away order plan and has also launched a new menu which, like their menus over the past decade, helps Scottish clientele by describing the food in guid braid Scots.

To achieve the authentic tongue the owners, back in the early 1990s, approached the senior editor at Scottish Language Dictionaries and asked her to translate the restaurant’s menu into Scots.

On offer are delicacies such as “lamb malabar (nippie) – tender wee daubs o’ lamb cookit in garam masala, wi’ black pepper and coconut milk” and “palak kofta makhani (nae nippie at aw) – caller spinach an tattie dumplins maskit wi spices”.

I wonder what Edinburgh’s Morningsiders with their posh accents will make of this. Will they need the menu translated into English?

Irving Hotson, born and brought up in Langholm and now a frequent visitor to his home town, has unearthed a poem written by a Canonbie woman in the 19th century.

It is called The Fairy Dance and is the work of Caroline Eliza Scott, born in 1777 at Forge in the parish of Canonbie.

While staying with an uncle in Madras, India, she met and married Gilbert Geddes Richardson, a captain in the British East India Company.

When her husband died in the prime of his life, she returned to her childhood home in Dumfriesshire with her five children. She published a volume of her poetry in 1828 and, after its success, a second followed, along with a novel and essay.

The Fairy Dance appears light-hearted but it ends with more thoughtful words.

The fairies are dancing – how nimbly they bound!

They flit o’er the grass tops, they touch not the ground;

Their kirtles of green are with diamonds bedight,

All glittering and sparkling beneath the moonlight.

Hark, hark to their music! how silvery and clear –

‘Tis surely the flower-bells that ringing I hear, –

The lazywing’d moth, with the grasshopper wakes,

And the field-mouse peeps out, and their revels partakes.

How featly they trip it! how happy are they

Who pass all their moments in frolic and play,

Who rove where they list, without sorrows or cares,

And laugh at the fetters mortality wears!

But where have they vanish’d? – a cloud’s o’er the moon

I’ll hie to the spot, – they’ll be seen again soon –

I hasten – ‘tis lighter, – and what do I view?

The fairies were grasses, the diamonds were dew.

And thus do the sparkling illusions of youth

Deceive and allure, and we take them for truth;

Too happy are they who the juggle unshroud,

Ere the hint to inspect them be brought by a cloud.

Have any of our Canonbie readers heard of this poet? With five children living near the village, there may well be some of her descendants still in the area.