I organised a Burns Supper in Mexico City - here's what it was like

This had included getting a pair of Mexican chefs to research and make their own haggis specially for the occasion.

I held my breath when they told me they had two pipers for the night but it turns out that Mexico has at least three highly regarded bagpipe bands and both players were excellent.

Victor Ramos from Whisky Mexico holding a bottle of Arran whisky (Image: Rocío Montes Moreno)

One of them grew up in San Francisco and took up the pipes after seeing them being played in parades there. The other was a punk as a teenager and became interested in bagpipe playing via listening to Celtic rock. He speaks English with a distinctive Ayrshire accent, which is unusual almost anywhere outside of Ayrshire never mind in Americanised Mexico. Between them, Galindo and Ramos gathered around 50 people, almost all of them Mexican.

They enjoyed the food, the pipers, the whisky tasting and the very short Burns poems recited – as fabulous as Tam O’Shanter is, more than a few minutes in broad Scots is a lot to ask of people who have English as a second language.

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My conversations with the guests showed they had a real interest in and, for me, pleasantly surprising, knowledge of Scotland.

I got involved in deep discussions about the exact nature of peat used to make whisky, the history and variety of haggis making and the merits of Glasgow v Edinburgh (I’m from Glasgow, you can imagine my answers) – and learned of a Mexican man’s dream of visiting Campbeltown one day.

What was highly noticeable was the complete absence of anyone from either the British Embassy or the British Chamber of Commerce in Mexico. An event designed to promote the culture and the produce of an important part of the UK – whisky makes up nearly 25% of the total of UK’s food and drink exports – was completely ignored.

I had wondered if it was simply a clash of diaries and if the embassy was busy promoting Scotland with their own Burns Night but someone with decades of diplomatic experience in Mexico told me the event I attended last week was the most anyone had ever done to promote Scotland in Mexico that he had seen.

He went on to explain that the British Embassy has only ever had a piper in attendance on the late Queen’s official birthday and when a former Mexican president had expressed a desire to visit the UK’s oil city during a trip to Britain, the embassy had actively discouraged him from going Aberdeen.

One of the enduring stories of the Union is how much Scotland “punches above its weight” on the world stage. This story says embassies of a former empire power from a country still highly regarded by many across the world can look after and promote the interests of Scotland far more than a country of merely five million people can hope to.

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It goes on to suggest we should feel fortunate to have an extensive network of embassies with a presence that is able to both look after and promote our interests.

If we are that lucky and they do that good a job, why in a country of 130 million people do we have to rely on two Mexicans such as Victor Ramos and Ernesto Galindo to take it upon themselves to promote Scotland? Why do we have an embassy that seems to do nothing to sell Scotland?

Everywhere you go in Mexico City there’s whisky on the menu. Our diplomats should be leveraging that any way they can. Mexicans are increasingly loath to send their children to the US to study as undergraduates. Why is Scotland with its excellent tertiary education not being pushed as an alternative?

Cultural tourism is an increasingly important part of our national income and promoting Scotland as a key component of every Mexicans’ European tour should be neither difficult nor expensive.

Sadly Mexicans told me that all the information they receive from the British Chamber of Commerce promotes London and absolutely nowhere else.

That Scotland has chosen as one of its national days an 18th-century farmer poet’s birthday – rather than a revolution or a only battle won – is a source of fascination for many across the globe.

Celebrating it at a diplomatic level as part of the UK should be used a prime example of how we punch above our weight. Sadly, in too many places in the world it seems the Foreign Office has left us with neither boxing gloves nor hands.