 When Robert Burns was born on the 25th of January, 1759, the son of a tenant farmer from Allaway in the west of Scotland, no one could imagine that still today, over 250 years later, people all around the world would gather to celebrate his birth, his poetry and songs, at dinners known as Burns' Supperers. Burns wrote from the heart, chiefly in the Scots vernacular, and he collected and conserved traditional songs too, including Ald Lang Sign. Inspired by everything from a field mouse to the lassies he loved, to the radical thinkers of his day, he created vivid characters like Tamar Shanta and wrote enduring love poems like Red Red Rose. In 1795, the year before he died, he wrote A Man's A Man for All That. The poem, which talks of international brotherhood, was performed as a song at the opening of the New Scottish Parliament in 1999. A sculpture of Burns is on display in the Parliament building and on the external cannon gate wall, quotations from two of his poems are inscribed on stone plaques. Robert Burns' Scotland's bard, but his poetry, speaks to everyone.