Friday was Robbie Burns Day for those of us who are Scottish and the rest of you who wish you were. So Saturday my non-Scottish friend (although I dare say his love of scotch makes him an honourary Scotsman) invited Chris and I for a night of festivities at the Air Force Officer's mess.

The thing about Scottish formal gatherings is that you have to eat haggis. Basically haggis is all the parts of a sheep that most sane people throw out. So to prepare us for this disgustingness, they prepped us mentally with an insane amount of scotch. That's the nice thing about being Scottish - you don't have to do anything disgusting unless you're drunk.

The haggis, as you hopefully can't really tell from this picture, is a sheep's stomach filled with ground up sheep's heart, liver and lungs, with a healthy dose of oatmeal to try to mask the disgustingness. It doesn't work.

Having been voted the "person with the most Scottish name" at our table (incidentally, I'm 25% Scottish and Chris is 50% so I call shenanigans on that one), I was selected to pierce open the stomach so that all could enjoy the mess of offal (pun intended) that awaited us.

Fortunately, there was more scotch to wash down the flavour. Here I am explaining to Chris that the particular scotch I'm drinking is 43% alcohol, according to the guy who was reading the tasting notes. All I know is that the fumes went right up my nose when I tried to drink it.

Fortunately, the Scottish know how to make one thing extremely well... shortbread! Drenched in ice cream and caramel sauce, the cookies (and scotch) soon made the haggis just a really bad memory. Much preferable to the really bad aftertaste it had been until that moment.

Robbie Burns must be so proud.