Robbie Burns day, and Simon Fraser University celebrates its Scots heritage with a parading piper who visits all three campuses, ending at Harbour Centre mid-afternoon. But instead of striding down from the heathery moors of Burnaby Mountain with his kilt flapping in the January breezes and his plums puckered and pulled up tight for warmth, SFU’s piper arrives via Skytrain from Surrey, led by a prim miss who bears an invitation to “Follow the piper to SFU’s Robbie Burns Day festivities.”

“Do you know what this is all about?” a puzzled pedestrian asks as he falls in at the end of the parade. It feels a bit like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, all of us mesmerized by the skirling sound (and what other day of the year invites such free use of the lovely word “skirling”?), drawn inside the urban cliff-face of 515 West Hastings Street never to be seen again.

But there is nothing quite so sinister in store; unless you consider a hammed-up reading of Burns’ “Address to a Haggis” — with dagger flourishes, and copious explanatory asides, culminating in the dagger’s plunge into the “warm-reekin, rich” entrails of the “great chieftain o the puddin’-race” — cause for alarm.

Mystified Asian students look on before resuming their interrupted English Language and Culture classes; “I wonder if this will be on the exam?”