ALL over the world people will be celebrating Burns' Night on January 25. But why Robert Burns?

It is the strangest thing. We sit down to haggis, neeps (swede) and tatties, but not before addressing the haggis by praising it in the words of Burns' own ode to "the great chieftain o' the pudding race."

William Shakespeare is probably the best known playwright and poet in the universe but we don't celebrate him every year so what is the secret of Scotland's Bard?

It started, according to the internet, in 1801 when five of his closest friends gathered to celebrate the life of the poet.

Burns suppers are individual events but wherever they are held but they all start with the poet's own Selkirk grace. This is followed by the haggis being piped in and the Ode to the Haggis recited. Dinner is served and then there is a toast to the immortal memory - Robert Burns himself.

It is celebrated in Tokyo, Moscow and anywhere the Scots have settled.

Dr Thomas Burns, the nephew of Robbie, is credited with bringing the Protestant Church to Otago in New Zealand and there are more descendants of the poet there than there probably are in Scotland!

Burns Night was huge there and there was one butcher in Dunedin who must have made his year's profit selling haggis before the big night!

As these photos show, however, Robert Burns is fondly remembered on this side of the border, and is used as a chance to both have a good night out and to raise money for charity.

Successive Carlisle mayors have used the Bard from over the border for a posh night out and to raise money for their charities.

Then there are the catering students, complete with piper, who created and entire Burns supper.

Especially 'cute' are the members of the Carlisle Auction who, discovering that the annual charity auction was on the eve of Burns Night, went Scottish!

People the world over greet the New Year with Auld Lang Syne, a poem by Robert Burns based on an even older poem.

But if you really want to toast The Immortal Memory, check out the opening of the Scottish Parliament in the 1990s where a woman sang the poem that should not just be Scotland's national anthem but that of the whole world: "For a’ that, an’ a’ that, It’s comin; yet for a’ that, That Man to Man the warld o’er Shall brithers be for a’ that."