You see yonder fellow called 'a lord,'
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Who struts, and stares, and all that;
Though hundreds worship at his word,
He's still just a coof (a ratbag) for all that:
For all that, and all that,
His medals, ribbons, titles and all that,
The man of independent mind,
He looks and laughs at all that.
- From Robbie Burns' A Man's a Man For A' That
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As a man and a columnist of independent mind I looked and laughed when the already shifty and noxious UK Labour figure Peter Mandelson was made 'Lord' Peter Mandelson.
Similarly, all Burns-minded Australians of independent mind looked and laughed (and perhaps seethed a little) when, incredibly, the strutting Scott Morrison was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), the nation's highest civilian honour, in the 2025 King's Birthday Honours List.
Burns the egalitarian was right about honours, medals, ribbons and titles, about how they are never given to the truly deserving and are just a superficial "tinsel show" that honest folk see through and laugh at.
Now, today, as I write, the honest man and woman of independent mind looks and laughs (a little cruelly, but understandably so) as first a hereditary Prince (now Andrew Mountbatten Windsor) and now 'Lord' Mandelson are found out and shamed by the Epstein scandals.
Rousing and splendid even just as words read off a page, Burns' hymn to the common man and to decency takes on an extra heft and splendour when it is sung.
On the recent Burns Day (the day is January 25, the day before our Invasion Day) I engaged in the ritual of going to YouTube for Midge Ure's profound rendition of it at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 2016.
Burns meant every word of his poem and Midge Ure means every word of it as he so sincerely sings it here. Robbie and Midge especially mean that poem's impossibly optimistic-idealistic last verse that promises us that, yes, for a' that (in spite of all the ugly evidence of our world to the contrary) the day of the brotherhood of man is at hand.
This Burns Day and as usual I shed unmanly tears as I listened to and sang along with all this great goodness, this noble, humanitarian, never-going-to-come-true nonsense. Only my fellow radical, socialist, Burnsian friend Turbo my kelpie was there to witness my effete tearfulness; and he is a great keeper of intimate secrets.
Just a few days later, just last weekend, the very same power of sung sentiments was magically testified to when the Italian supertenor Andrea Bocelli sang Nessun Dorma during the generally bedazzling (but sometimes flashy for the sake of flashiness) opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.
The aria Nessun Dorma ("None shall sleep") is from Puccini's opera Turandot and as it happens I am an opera fanatic-tragic and a smarty pants and so know exactly what the words of the aria are saying and how those words-sentiments fit into the opera's story-saga.
And one just knew the world-famous piece would be a jewel in the crown of the Italian opening ceremony, given that is from one of Italian composer Puccini's always-performed-in-Italian operas. Italian pride.
The late Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti's renditions of Nessun Dorma are so fabulously famous that one half-expected Pavarotti himself to somehow be there at the ceremony to sing it, perhaps somehow virtually there, enabled by a kind of high-tech semi-spiritual séance miracle.
But as it was the living Andrea Bocelli, an Italian hero, sang it thrillingly, goosebumpraisingly.
But I have digressed, because I was about to say that one doesn't need to be an informed smarty pants to be thrilled by Nessun Dorma. Not many folk among the teeming millions of the world who followed the ceremony will have known or cared what, in words, was being sung about. I could tell you here (and I can assure you the aria's words have nothing to do with winter sports) but can see no point, no need.
No, it is enough, as one listens to the aria to feel in one's goosebumped heart and soul and giblets that what's going on here is all about those most important of all human matters, Love and Death.
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The tenor (as Prince Calaf) we can hear in the music and in his agitated manner is fast approaching a Love and Death/Life and Death crisis. He is singing up-stoking up his spirits so that he has courage enough to face what's coming. "Vincer! Vincer!" ("I will win! I will win!") he trumpets, pluckily.
Facing/trying to face Life's ordeals is such a universal experience that it thrills us to hear and feel the experience being sincerely emoted about, especially by an Andrea Bocelli or a Luciano Pavarotti.
Sung emotions (so for example sung in unfamiliar Italian or in the difficult Ayrshire dialect of Burns' humanitarian masterpiece) somehow have twice the emotive power of spoken ones.
Why is it so? Ah, another of the sweet mysteries of life for those of us of independent and idealistic mind to wrestle with as we wait expectantly for the day Burns promises us is coming:
That Sense and Worth over all the earth
Shall take the prize and all that.
That Man to Man to man the world over
Shall brothers be for all that.
- Ian Warden is a regular contributor.
