IN CASE it has escaped your attention in the enormous excesses of the festive season, tomorrow night is New Year’s Eve, when the whole merry-go-round starts up again.

And come midnight, millions of people around the world will be folding their arms across their bodies and bawling out that old Hogmanay favourite Auld Lang Syne.

Pedants such as me will wince when virtually everybody gets the words Robbie Burns committed to paper the best part of 250 years ago wrong – the “syne” is pronounced with an S not a Z, and there is no need to say “for the sake of” auld lang syne, as auld lang syne means for old times’ sake

But who cares about accuracy on this most joyous night of the year when we can all look forward eagerly and wonder what the unsullied new year will bring, apart from a raging headache and resolutions to be broken before Twelfth Night?

While I have spent the early hours of far too many New Year’s Days shouting for God down the Big White Telephone, Mrs Hexol and I have enjoyed some memorable Old Year’s Nights over the years, including a spell when we and friends used to have a progressive fancy dress party, moving from house to house in elaborate costumes.

Mrs Hextol once encased herself in a shimmering tubular creation of cardboard and crepe paper to become a Christmas cracker, but the construction was such that she could not sit down, and spent the entire evening either propped up in a corner, or hopping from venue to venue.

I have been everything from Rene from Allo Allo and Frankenstein’s Monster, to Rab C. Nesbitt.

That costume was not a success, as a fellow reveller was so overcome by my string vest that he tried to rip it off, and I suffered vest burns from which I still bear the scars.

Now old Rab C. was something of an anti-establishment poet, which brings me back to Burns, the man who has the power to turn all Scots even more lachrymal than usual, especially on Burns Night, which is just around the corner.

I have to admit to a sneaking regard for Burns, the Alloway excise man, for he was enormously entertaining in writing largely incomprehensible odes about everything from a louse, a mouse and a sheep’s stomach stuffed with oatmeal and offal.

The dialect is thicker than a week-old bowl of porage oats, but once you penetrate that, it’s fantastic stuff.

Few people appreciate how far his influence has stretched over the years, particularly in America, where many are unaware that the title of John Steinbeck’s classic tale Of Mice and Men comes from Burns’s 1785 epic To a Mouse, or that the new Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan was inspired to greatness by Burns’s immortal My Love is Like a Red Red Rose.

And how many realise that the famous tea clipper Cutty Sark, the noted landmark at Greenwich during the London Marathon, was named after a fruity witch in the Burns poem Tam O’Shanter?

Burns continues to confuse to this day, with some supposedly knowledgeable folk insisting that Burns Night should be written as Burns’ Night or even Burn’s Night, because his name happens to end in an S.

Pointing out that if England’s national poet, William Shakespeare has his own day, it would be Shakespeare Day, not Shakespeare’s day, fails to cut any ice.

Poetry is often seen as a bit soppy, but there was no-one less limp wristed than my father, who brought his five children up on a strict diet of the Barrack Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling.

There’s nothing namby pamby about Tommy, Gunga Din or Danny Deevor which paint a witheringly accurate picture of a soldier’s view of army life at the height of the Victorian empire.

Many a Sunday evening would be spent sitting in a circle at his feet, as he pulled down the battered black volume from the sideboard after a bibulous afternoon at the Royal Oak, and regaled us with the stirring tributes to foreign foes like the followers of the Mad Mahdi, who had the rare distinction of breaking the supposedly impregnable British Square.