One of my earliest political memories is of the minister in my grandparents’ church starting the service with a prayer for striking miners. A few years later, at the Glasgow Comic Art Convention, I remember Alan Grant, the Scottish co-writer of Judge Dredd and Batman, exhorting the audience not to pay the poll tax. This was also the era in which a fictional, unemployed, ranting Glaswegian with a bandage wrapped around his head became a beloved national symbol.

Indeed, in the 80s and 90s, a freewheeling attitude of utter contempt for the high and mighty seemed as Scottish as a Tunnock’s Tea Cake. Yet on my first visit home from Texas since pandemic chaos destabilised the world, I detected a very different mood in the air.

This was the first time I had been in Scotland since the government at Holyrood had passed a law making it illegal to utter wicked words in the home, the enforcement of which will necessarily involve family members denouncing the sinners among them to the authorities. I had missed Nicola Sturgeon’s daily briefings on TV, although I was aware that when the BBC had proposed to broadcast them less often, and perhaps not in full, there had been “widespread criticism”, while a petition to keep them on air had attracted over 50,000 signatures.

Meanwhile, I found myself receiving regular moral instruction from the government in the form of signs admonishing me against uttering wicked words on the train, letting my dog shit in the street, or conversely, letting my dog hunt hares; minimal unit pricing for alcohol had also been in place for three years. That finger wagging from the pulpit energy was back: it was as if the Scottish government feared that an irredeemably sinful people might at any moment erupt in spasms of hatred aimed at both humans and speedy animals with long ears.

What happened to the Scotland I remember? It was as if, by voting the nationalists into power, my fellow countrymen had accidentally resurrected Calvinism in woke form. The national poet wouldn’t have liked this much, I thought — and not simply because, were Robert Burns to return today, he would be cancelled in seconds both for his womanising, and his efforts to get a job as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation in Jamaica.

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A deep disdain for authoritarian piety runs through Burns’ poetry, informed not only by his rebellious temperament but also his direct experience of being denounced from the pulpit by the moral guardians of his day. Most famously, in Holy Willie’s Prayer he satirised a self-satisfied Calvinist believer who thanks God for making him one of the elect and justifies his lustful nature as a “fleshly thorn” intended by God to prevent him from becoming too perfect. Simultaneously he prays in a most unforgiving fashion for the destruction of his enemies for the same sins. Thanks to Burns, Holy Willie became archetypal, and I have often thought about his 21^st century equivalents while walking around Edinburgh. For Burns, however, it was personal: the man he mocked was no abstraction but a certain William Fisher, an elder in Burns’ own parish, and the poem was so libellous that he circulated it in private.

But it wasn’t just preachy, vindictive hypocrites that earned Burns’ mockery. In To a Louse he describes in loving detail the journey of a louse to the top of a lady’s bonnet in full view of everyone but her. Extracted from the poem, the famous lines “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us!” sound like a prayer for wisdom and humility, but read in the context of the preceding verses it is hard to escape Burns’s glee at puncturing his neighbour’s self-satisfaction. Indeed, Burns sought to undermine just about everything that Calvinist worthies presented to him as sombre and sacred; in Tam O’Shanter, a drunkard’s horse outruns a horde of spirits, while in his Address To the Deil, Burns suggests that even “Auld Hornie” himself might have a shot at redemption if he would only change his ways.

Would the religious authorities of Burns’s day have accused him of “stirring up hatred” had such a vaguely worded law existed at the time? It seems likely. And would Burns, so aware of the lines he crossed in his own verse that he circulated some of it secretly, have felt at ease in a country where friends and family are encouraged to inform on each other for things said in their own homes? It seems unlikely.

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Yet many Scots do appear to be comfortable in such an environment, and place great trust in the authorities to always do the right thing, to adjudicate with wisdom over what can and cannot be said in private as well as in public. The more I thought about it, the more my experience growing up in Scotland in the 80s and 90s seemed anomalous. Perhaps the virulently anti-authority strain in the national character was especially pronounced back then not because of some innate aspect of the Scottish soul but rather because the country was ruled by an indifferent Conservative government in London that had very little support north of the border.

Between Thatcher’s election in 1979 and her resignation in 1990, she managed to alienate large swathes of Scottish voters, and the number of Conservative MPs in Scotland dropped from 22 to 10. When Alan Grant took to the podium to inveigh against the Poll Tax in front of a bunch of youthful comic fans, it had already been in place for a year longer than in England. Mrs. Thatcher had decided to experiment with it first in the test lab of Scotland, where she wasn’t too bothered about alienating voters.

It’s not that all Scottish people were contemptuous of all authority; but many of them were contemptuous of that authority. After all, it’s easy to be anti-establishment when you have nothing to gain from the establishment. Once the SNP came to power, that changed. There was a different power in the land, and many people identified with it, agreed with it, and benefited from it. Meanwhile the Brexit vote and the omnishambles of Boris Johnson’s leadership has made it easy for the SNP to direct that caustic, skeptical, questioning attitude southwards.

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It was easy, too, for Burns to hate the establishment. When he wrote those poems mocking the powerful and attacking hypocrites, he — a poor farmer and notorious fornicator — was completely alienated from the powers that stood over him. But what if he had lived in today’s Scotland, where a poet of his stature would not need to think about moving to Jamaica to earn money, but might instead be offered a cushy professorship at a state-funded university, prestigious seats on cultural committees and access to funding from Creative Scotland?

I doubt that even then he’d bite his tongue. Following the success of his first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Burns moved to Edinburgh where he was feted by the literary elites of his day. In this environment his jabs at preachers and rural overlords were about as edgy as attacking Trump in the pages of The Guardian, and he began to focus on collecting and reworking traditional ballads instead of insulting  the church elders who annoyed him.

But he still enjoyed provoking the sacred cows of his new audience, too. His poem, A Dream, which Burns wrote in response to a particularly unctuous encomium to George III not only disparaged the king but included the suggestion that Bonnie Prince Charlie might have done a better job. To the enlightened Edinburgh readership of Burns’s day this was much more ‘problematic’ than whatever derision he aimed at rural ministers: support for the vanquished Stuarts was not only politically unacceptable but regarded as an uncultivated, lower class belief. Burns in fact had written it before moving to the big city, but he kept on publishing it in every edition of Poems, even when it would have been in his interests to leave it out.

As the literary scholar Carol McGuirk observes, Burns was a man “stimulated by prohibitions”. He would find plenty to stimulate him in Scotland today. The love poet, the man of the people, the composer of odes to haggis — I like that poet. But the Burns I find most inspiring is the annoying guy, the rebel who doesn’t trust overbearing Calvinist types, and who doesn’t pander to self-satisfied elites, even when it’s in his best interest to do so. It is those qualities that make him a poet not only of his time, or more generally of ‘all times’, but specifically for our times.

“What an age we live in. Our culture has subverted and corrupted a festival – Advent – about patient waiting and anticipation. It’s turned it into one that involves indulging ourselves into a coma of mindless consumption the moment we lift our heads from the pillow.”

Advent used to be a time of fasting (and still is in Orthodox Christianity). However, we’ve turned it into an extended pre-Christmas Christmas blow-out – short on spiritual significance; long on shopping, eating and drinking.

The result is that we’ve spoiled Christmas itself – by which I don’t just mean Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but what used to be celebrated as the Twelve Days of Christmas. Most of those have gone out the window – Boxing Day has slipped into an exhausted, alcoholic stupor; the less said about New Year’s Eve the better; and as for Twelfth Night and the Feast of the Epiphany, forget it (as indeed most of us have).

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We do mark a new solemnity, however – the Expulsion of the Christmas Trees, in which desiccated firs compete with overflowing wheelie bins for pavement space. Other Christmas decorations, if not thrown away, are packed away – the halls comprehensively undecked in readiness for the secular counterweight to the secularised Advent – a season not of preparation, but of regret. Welcome to ‘Dry January’ or, as it is alternatively known in the gym trade, ‘Sweaty January’.

Goodness knows that our livers, waistbands and bank balances need the break – but, unfortunately, it comes at just the wrong time of year. Winter after Christmas is a different beast to Winter before it – an altogether more vicious one. If ever there were a time of the year not to bring the cheer of Christmas to a harsh and premature halt, it is this one. And yet we do so because the modern world is almost as detached from the natural cycle of seasons as it is from the Christian calendar.

We may think we’re familiar with the ‘traditional’ four seasons of Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn – and the shifts that mark the transition from one to the next – but, insulated within our bubbles of artificial light and warmth, we’re really not. In fact we can’t even agree among ourselves when each season starts.

I’d argue that four seasons aren’t enough to describe the key changes of the year. We could learn from the Sami (Lapplander) people of northern Scandinavia, who recognise eight seasons. These include several gradations in what we’d think of as (a very long) Winter, but which make all the difference to a nomadic, reindeer-herding culture (for instance, if the Sun never rose at all in the darkest part of our year, we’d also give it its own special season).

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There was a time when the 12 months played a similar role – signifying more than a mere allotment of days, but a mini-season full of cultural (and agricultural) significance. For instance, the Anglo-Saxon calendar included months like Thrimilce-monath – ‘the month of three milkings’ (May) and Aerra Litha – ‘the month before midsummer’, a.k.a. First Summer (June).

The spread of the Roman calendar across Europe and, eventually, the world – has provided us with a shared system of dates, but a pretty useless guide to the shifting seasons (and all the more so across a wide range of latitudes and climates). Of the names of our months, only April (which may be derived from aperire – the Latin for ‘to open’) refers to a natural phenomenon.

One can almost forgive the French revolutionary authorities for imposing a republican calendar, in which an entirely new set of months referred to (supposedly) seasonal events. For instance, the three months of Spring were Germinal, Floréal and Prairial – referring to germination, flowers and meadows. However, the system was abandoned in 1805 – perhaps because it was so arbitrary. For instance, the Winter month of Pluviôse (late January and most of February) refers to rain, when, of course, it can rain throughout the year.

So, if the months can’t help us, what we need are more seasons. Like the Sami, I think we should recognise eight. And before naming them I ought to say that my geographical reference point is southern England.

So, let’s start at the beginning of the year i.e. not just Winter, but the dead-of-winter: cold all the time; no leaves on the trees; long nights only imperceptibly shortening. What little snow that global warming has left to us will most likely fall in the next few weeks and the frosts will be at their hardest. To distinguish it from Winter before Christmas, let’s call it Hoar Winter – or, if that’s a little indelicate to 21st-century ears, White Winter (hoar, as in hoar frost, being an Anglo-Saxon word for white).

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Just when White Winter is grinding you down, comes the gentlest of transitions to the next season, which I’ll call First Spring. It is ushered in, stage-by-stage, by the appearance of flowers: snowdrops, then crocuses, then daffodils. The ground thaws, fields are ploughed, the days lengthen (noticeably) and the birds start singing again – albeit perched on bare branches.

As buds unfurl, Second Spring arrives with foliage of a colour so fresh that ‘green’ doesn’t do quite do it justice. Entire landscapes transform in the space of a week – perhaps the most dramatic of all the natural transitions: and surely one signifying a shift between seasons, not a mere event within one. Second Spring may also favour us with the first warm days of the year. Then again, it might not, this is England after all.

By the end of May, new leaf has become full leaf – and merely, not miraculously, green. Maximum light brings early morning wakefulness and sustained warmth. Though still officially ‘Spring’, we should call this time what it is – Midsummer.

When warmth gives way to heat, at least periodically, Midsummer becomes High Summer. It is the most divisive of seasons – a breathless slog for those trapped in their routines, but ‘another Eden’ for those at liberty.

It can’t last, of course, and by the end of August, the heat breaks. The unobservant remark that ‘Autumn is in the air’, but look at the trees, you fools! The leaves aren’t browning – they’ve turned the darkest of greens, almost black against the white-gold of ripened wheat fields. It is absurd to speak of Autumn or Summer when we have a perfectly good word for a season distinct from both: Harvest.

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In fact, let’s do away with Autumn altogether. When the Earth has given up its harvest, the season that follows has another perfectly good and self-explanatory name: Fall. Like many Americanisms it was originally a Britishism – and should be again.

The year ends as night intrudes into the working day. Leaves blanket the ground; and the earth, if not frozen, sleeps. Instinctively, we light fires against the darkness – and, in an age of material plenty, feast when we should be fasting. I’m not entirely sure what to call this season – perhaps I’ll borrow Fore-Yule from the Anglo-Saxon calendar.

So, a cycle of eight seasons and four pairs of opposites: White Winter (cold) and High Summer (heat); First spring (sowing) and Harvest (reaping); Second Spring (life) and Fall (death); Midsummer (light) and Fore-Yule (dark).

Of course, I’m reinventing the wheel here – and my crude observations have been made and stated by many others before me with greater grace and acuity. And yet they are worth restating.

In a world of industrialised novelty, our reckoning of events is directed to the documentation of the new and away from an understanding of permanence and circularity. In matters both secular and sacred, natural and supernatural, we have lost touch with older conceptions of time – and it is time we reconnected.