Hogmanay celebrated by plebs in Edinburgh

      Our family have always hated the whole Hogmanay and New Year thing. That feeling of enforced jollity is designed to make any right minded person feel gloomy. To avoid having jolly fellow Edinburghers  attempting to visit us, we turn the lights out and hide and attempt to go to bed early. However the fireworks over Edinburgh Castle at midnight make that difficult.
     However now I understand it all. I must feel this way because I am not a Pleb - that wicked word used supposedly by the MP and Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell and which caused him to lose his job in what is now being called "Plebgate".  He called a policeman a Pleb and in Britain, on the brink of a class revolution, there is  supposedly no worse insult.
     According to a disapproving Scottish Presbyterian Church in 1693
" It is ordinary among some Plebians in the South of Scotland, to go about from door to door upon New Years Eve crying Hagmane"
      Goodness knows what Hagmane meant!