You can stretch right up and touch the sky
Last weekend saw me, with Mabel Gubbins, at the annual Lamb Ale held by Kirtlington Morris. As events go, it's rubbish for a rapper team. There are two pubs in the village, neither of which will let us inside to dance, so we do a lot of scuffing about on concrete. However! It's a grand social occasion, we get to see lots of other teams and generally hang out and eat lots of nice food.
The weather was lovely at the weekend, so I pottered over on the Saturday to pitch my tent and join in with the general barbecueage. As is frequently the case with bring-yer-own barbecues, we ended up with ridiculously too much food and ate most of it anyway.
Once we'd finished stuffing our faces, we trundled up to the Florida ceilidh for the last hour or so, and I then tucked myself up in bed. At Lamb Ale, the campsite is the village green (don't pitch your tent inside the cricket boundary) next to the village church. Which means that when you get woken up by the frankly ludicrously loud dawn chorus and wonder what time it is, sooner or later there will be a lot of bonging and then you will know.
Sunday sees a certain amount of processing back and forth, some dancing in various concretey places (with an occasional patch of gravel for variety) and then the grand finale where all the teams (thirteen this year, I think, plus the hosts) dance in the school playground. Seven Champs, the best molly team[*] in the world, reformed a few years ago and were there in force being as excellent as ever and dancing to 5/4 tunes without any evidence of concentration. And if, this weekend, you didn't see a man in a coloured print dress, yellow apron, tackety boots and full black face make-up ride pillion, on a purple chopper, behind a man in traditional morris kit then... well, then you were somewhere else.
(Disappointingly, there was some confusion with the running order. So the bike roared into the arena, Champs' fool making a grand entrance with his trademark broom held aloft, to be greeted by a chorus from the rest of the team of "Er, we're not on yet, Chris".)
Of course, what with the weather being what it has been of late, it simply didn't occur to me to pack sun cream :( I did manage to filch some from another Mabel later in the day, thus avoiding the worst of the damage, but I still feel a little crispy round the edges. And to add insult to injury, the Dashwood had heard that I had to drive myself home and had got in a barrel of Rebellion's Blonde specially to upset me. Bah!
Still: laughed a lot, ate a lot, danced a bit, drank a bit. Not a bad summary of a weekend :)
[*] Molly dancing is a type of folk-dancing from the Fens and is one of those forms of dance which is deceptively easy. This leads to a lot of teams forming, spending a lot of time designing their costumes, making up some very simple molly-style dances, doing them badly, and getting the whole thing a bad name. Seven Champions (in my humble opinion) are the best team out there; they're technically brilliant, they're very entertaining, and their dances and music are interesting. There's a very brightly coloured molly team from Cambridge (Gog Magog) who also buck the trend, but I don't rate them as highly as Champs.
The weather was lovely at the weekend, so I pottered over on the Saturday to pitch my tent and join in with the general barbecueage. As is frequently the case with bring-yer-own barbecues, we ended up with ridiculously too much food and ate most of it anyway.
Once we'd finished stuffing our faces, we trundled up to the Florida ceilidh for the last hour or so, and I then tucked myself up in bed. At Lamb Ale, the campsite is the village green (don't pitch your tent inside the cricket boundary) next to the village church. Which means that when you get woken up by the frankly ludicrously loud dawn chorus and wonder what time it is, sooner or later there will be a lot of bonging and then you will know.
Sunday sees a certain amount of processing back and forth, some dancing in various concretey places (with an occasional patch of gravel for variety) and then the grand finale where all the teams (thirteen this year, I think, plus the hosts) dance in the school playground. Seven Champs, the best molly team[*] in the world, reformed a few years ago and were there in force being as excellent as ever and dancing to 5/4 tunes without any evidence of concentration. And if, this weekend, you didn't see a man in a coloured print dress, yellow apron, tackety boots and full black face make-up ride pillion, on a purple chopper, behind a man in traditional morris kit then... well, then you were somewhere else.
(Disappointingly, there was some confusion with the running order. So the bike roared into the arena, Champs' fool making a grand entrance with his trademark broom held aloft, to be greeted by a chorus from the rest of the team of "Er, we're not on yet, Chris".)
Of course, what with the weather being what it has been of late, it simply didn't occur to me to pack sun cream :( I did manage to filch some from another Mabel later in the day, thus avoiding the worst of the damage, but I still feel a little crispy round the edges. And to add insult to injury, the Dashwood had heard that I had to drive myself home and had got in a barrel of Rebellion's Blonde specially to upset me. Bah!
Still: laughed a lot, ate a lot, danced a bit, drank a bit. Not a bad summary of a weekend :)
[*] Molly dancing is a type of folk-dancing from the Fens and is one of those forms of dance which is deceptively easy. This leads to a lot of teams forming, spending a lot of time designing their costumes, making up some very simple molly-style dances, doing them badly, and getting the whole thing a bad name. Seven Champions (in my humble opinion) are the best team out there; they're technically brilliant, they're very entertaining, and their dances and music are interesting. There's a very brightly coloured molly team from Cambridge (Gog Magog) who also buck the trend, but I don't rate them as highly as Champs.