In the 250th anniversary year of Robert Burns’s birth there are several ways we in Scotland might take a lead from him. We could repeatedly get drunk. In this condition the males among us could lay one woman after another, following discussion of their respective merits in dirty talk with our drouthie cronies.

Needless to say this would be unprotected sex performed in a spirit of utter indifference to potential pregnancies, amang the rigs o’barley perhaps. Irksome consequences would be the female’s own silly fault.

If our country grows too hot to hold us, we could contemplate emigration with the aim of exploiting black people — but then find some convenient excuse for not going through with it.

Then, after making a feckless mess of various small businesses, we could get a job in the public sector, that great wheelie bin being fast filled up by all the trash in Britain. Our duties would be pointless and parasitic but could at least provide an income, something a great many more hard-working people are not going to have. Gordon Brown would approve of us.

All this is advice that could be addressed nowadays to members of the underclass in Scotland’s sink housing schemes. Yet it is derived from the actual history of Burns as a great hero of the nation. The fact that his experience appears so ordinary, his behaviour so typical, is one of the big reasons he became a hero. Whether the experience and behaviour were good, admirable or commendable is a different matter.

Alex Salmond, the first minister, thinks so. In his New Year’s message to us, he said Burns could help to pull Scotland through tough economic times. At the 250th anniversary of the bard’s birth, a “wonderful opportunity” presents itself.

It is only right to mark Burns’s 250th anniversary in a literary sense. But in 2009 his example in a practical sense could well send Scotland straight down the tubes. Are there not at the very least other, preferable heroes for a period of adversity?

For a start there might be William Wallace, Robert Bruce, John Knox, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Andrew Carnegie. Being Scots, they are every one flawed heroes, just like Burns.

Wallace was a loser, Bruce too much of a toff, Charlie ditto, Knox spread gloom and Carnegie called out troops to shoot down the striking workers whose toil had made him a multi-millionaire.

But flawed though these men were, they had redeeming features. They were, to put it mildly, more persevering than Burns who is hardly a worthy role model to build an entire year of events around.

Wallace showed the nation it could save itself from extinction, Bruce organised that, Knox made Scottish education democratic, Charlie bequeathed us the tartan cult and Carnegie gave away his ill-gotten gains to philanthropic causes. These are all, in their different ways, notable things to have done — and certainly among the things that have kept Scotland going rather against the odds.

Lucky for Burns that he never had to face such challenges. There was no spider spinning its web for him, no chained servitude in the French galleys, no flight through the heather as the prelude to salvation or redemption or just escape. The indications are that he could scarcely have coped with the same extremes of good or ill fortune.

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