What's In The Bag

I made this one up many years ago after bumping into a notorious local poacher cleaning sea-trout in a wash-hand basin in the toilets of the Mercat Hotel in Haddington. Haddington, like Berwick, absorbed a lot of words from "the Cant" – the jargon of the Border Gypsies. My poacher acquaintance had a wide knowledge of the Cant, so I couldn’t resist slipping some of it into this song.