The Cheerful Insanity of Me

It's Freaks in the Peaks this weekend.

This time it's in Hathersage.

It's a friendly social kind of morris thing with huge sets of people performing in a village in the peaks, some of whom have only just learnt the dances a few hours beforehand.

I imagine it's going to be something like the one I went to back in September with social sessiony dancey stuff in the evenings on Friday/Saturday, a workshop to teach the dances followed by dance out on Saturday day and a walk and dance out on the Sunday.

If you suddenly finds yourself in the peaks this weekend at a loss as to what to do then the details are here

and the honour goes to...

*carefully opens large golden envelope*

...Tyler's Men strangely enough.

We'll be at Whittlesea Straw Bear on Saturday at the following spots

10.45 - 11.45 at the War Memorial with Red Leceister and New Rose
12.15 - 12.45 at the Market Place with Northampton Morris and some side called Gog Magog whoever they are
1.45 - 2.45 at the Crown with White Rose and the Kings Morris
3.00 - 3.30 on Station Road with Peterborough Morris, Old Glory, Rutland and Stone Monkey

The other major thing happening this weekend is the clock's change, which means more dancing as I've been invited to dance with Tylers Men on their clocks tour on Sunday.

Never even seen them, let alone danced with them before, so this could be interesting...

We're (I say we, but I've no idea who we are apart from a few blackheath people and a couple of familiar recipiant names on the emails) starting dancing at The Duke of Hamilton, New End at around 12.30


Is dancing with 6 sides in one year excessive?

It does means that I will have managed to double the maximum number of sides I've danced with in previous years. How'd that happen?

Don't think I'll try doubling it again. Even I'm not stupid enough to try for 12!

Then again... it could be fun!

In January 2003, I fell into the folk world by discovering Gogs (that's a long story in itself). These things seem to work, that you take up one folk thing and people keep suggesting you go to others until your diary has no room for any more. Being a student, one of the first things to be suggested to me was IVFDF and inspite of being fairly adamant I didn't have time to go, I ended up at my first IVFDF in Sheffield that year and got my first taste of Border in one of the workshops (no idea which team ran it now). It was in that workshop that I first heard about Freaks in the Peaks.

On getting back to Cambridge, I promptly joined their mailing list eager to give it a go and that's about as far as I got.

...until this year when all the Gogs got enthused at about it by Daisy and it suddenly occured to me that I should do something about the fact that I've been lurking on their mailing list for 6 years intending to go at some indetermined point in the future. The upshot of which was I finally went to one last weekend.

In some ways it's got a lot of the social side of IVFDF without the hecticness (although it was probably as tiring if not more so). On the Friday evening we met in a local pub and there was a bit of a session, but it was more just sitting around socialising and then we headed back to the village hall for indoor camping.

The Saturday started with a bit of a walk around the area with some of Stone the Crows whilst everyone else was asleep before returning to the village hall for breakfast. The morning then was run as a workshop teaching most of the dances to be performed over the weekend. The dances are fun with enough room to play around with them a bit when your dancing, but not too complicated so you can pick them up from the run throughs in the morning.

At some point during this I discovered what happens when you write this much about folk on here, when bessiebell correctly identified me purely from the mention of 2 sides I dance with. Presumably one of which must have been Thrales, but I don't remember. I was more taken aback by the "I dance with x, y...", "You must be Owen" of the conversation. Definitely seems to be the year for randomly bumping into LJ folkies.

After lunch we went and danced them all out at a couple of pubs in the village before heading back to the hall for a communal vegetarian (mainly vegan) meal for anyone who wanted followed by an informal session/dancing/sitting around/doing whatever took people's fancy until the early hours of the morning.

The weekend was rounded off with a walk around the peaks on Sunday with a pub/lunch/dance spot part way around.

Which nicely left me in an exhausted daze for the trip up to Penrith. I'd managed to hitch a lift up the M6 with bessiebell who was heading that way, but I can't have been the most riveting of company as I'd seemed to have completely forgotten how to speak English by that point.

All in all an amazing weekend, can't wait for January. If anyone else fancies coming along it's likely to be near Holmfirth on 29-31 January. After that they're off down to Cambridge (Granchester in fact) on 16-18 April. Details here or go here to sign up for their mailing list.

Turns out I seem to have been missing a really good festival by having never been to Broadstairs before. It's got a lot more character to it than somewhere like Sidmouth or Towersey, which although lovely do seem to have a "mass produced" feel about them. They also don't have 10 hobby horses running around the town causing complete chaos, which Broadstairs does! :-)

Went up Friday evening and after getting the tent up headed over to the Friday evening ceilidh. I've never walked into a ceilidh to find all the sets back-to-front before (men on the womens side, women on the mens side), but it was consistent. Generally the Friday ceilidh was a very weak start to the weekend, not many people there and generally lacking in energy. I've not heard the Knifegrinders before, they didn't have a lot of drive to them, but that could be down to the audience. I think part of the problem was that 7.30-9.30 does seem very early for a ceilidh, the late night one on Saturday worked a lot better, as did all the late night spots.

On Friday the late night performance was by Mamienco, a French group mixing rock, jazz and gypsy music. They had a lot of energy and the pavilion was a lot more packed with much younger people than the ceilidh earlier in the evening, which gave it a much better buzz too.

On Saturday we were performing most of the afternoon at various places along the seafront. It was a nice laid back arrangement of dance between these times, here's a suggested starting spot, but we'll leave it up to use your judgement to move around spots. The one criticism I would have of that system is that they didn't include any details of when different sides were dancing in the programme, so you had no idea when to look around for them.

There was a short procession along the seafront to the bandstand during the afternoon followed by a performance there, which generally went down well, but not as well as the evening.

It was the torchlit procession that was one of the major highlights of the weekend. We'd been asked to lead it, so we were right at the front and the streets were absolutely packed with people. As it was dark we had the lights in our masks on and apparently as soon as the procession reached the bottom of the hill and turned onto the seafront, you could see our glowing red eyes bobbing up and down from the bandstand as we headed down that way.

As soon as we reached the bandstand, we found they'd changed the running order for the sides that they'd changed the running order for the sides which had been asked to do a dance at the end of the procession and we'd been moved from first to last. We got a good cheer at the end of that.

The performance nicely finished in time to get to the Glorystrokes ceilidh, who were good, but not as good as I've heard them play before. They only had one of their melodeon players (they've had 2 every other time I've seen them) and although it's the heavy metal electric guitar sounds that make them different they don't work quite so well without both melodeons cutting through it at the top. 2 hours did seem very short for a ceilidh and I could have happily danced a couple more hours afterwards.

Our second busking spot was on the Sunday morning and our dancing was generally a lot better than I've seen it in years. I was still buzzing from the Saturday evening and as it was our last day there was no need to save anything for later, so I was just going for it and I think a lot of the others in the side were doing the same. There was certainly plenty of energy flying around.

Loitered around for the Sunday evening, which was well worth it as the late night concert on Sunday had to be the highlight of the whole weekend. I'd never heard Warblefly before, but they had this amazing grungy folk rock sound. Was pleased to see they will also be playing at Wallingford, only to discover that they're concert is at exactly the same time as our ceilidh spot on the Friday evening, bother! I'm sure festival organisers shift through my brain to figure out the things I'd like so they can make them deliberately clash with spots.

All in all an excellent festival. I'm very tempted to try and go along for the whole week next year.

By the sounds of things we went down very well, so hopefully won't be too long before the Hunt get invited back again.

Having been getting into the habit of posting about dance outs before they happened, I appear to have totally forgotten about today.

Therefore, if anyone was interested, you could have seen us dance by the Green in West Peckham as guests of Boughton Monchelsea Morris from about 12 noon until around 4 pm.

They invite quite a few sides along and we all have a picnic and take it in turns to dance. There were around 13 or 14 in total this year (apparently they have been less in the past), which meant we only got to do 3 dances in the end, but it was still a fun afternoon all the same and quite relaxed. I don't think it would really work very well if they got any more teams than that along though.

Only 3 dances and I'm now absolutely shattered, I think the endless supply of energy I've had recently has finally run out. Luckily, the endless supplies of weekend dance outs has done so too and I now have 2 free weekends (plus a week off work in between). Just noticed that's 7 weekends in a row, which might explain why I'm tired really *makes a note to learn how to say no*

Current plans for next weekend are to go straight to sleep when I get home on Friday and not get up again until the 3rd.

At some point, I'll post something that isn't about morris dancing again.

In the meantime I'll just say that Wild Hunt are dancing out at the Dolphin in Betchworth from 8pm tomorrow with Rampant Rooster.

This year seems to have a theme of dancing in the traditional regions, having already danced in Northumberia (rapper at DERT) and the Cotswolds (although admittedly that was rapper too rather than Cotswold).

This weekend sees me in the Welsh Border, actually being unoriginal and doing border this time with Wild Hunt at The Two Rivers Folk Festival in Chepstow.

We have a programme for the weekend, which basically just says we'll be dancing somewhere around here *waves hand unhelpfully over the full map* on Saturday afternoon and then doing some more on Sunday.

Which means that I'll spending Friday evening touring the borough with Thrales and then need to be at Paddington at 7.45 on Saturday morning *gulp*. Must get the bad idea alarm in my head fixed at some point, either that or invent a few extra hours in which to do that sleeping lark.

Angmering is a funny place. Firstly the station is no where near the village itself (as I found out when I asked for directions to the pub in the off licence by the station only to find out I was somewhere that wasn't Angmering). Secondly all the roads look the same and finally to make matters even worse, they swap them all around while your not looking making it impossible to find your way back to the station again. Luckily some of the dancers from one of the other sides we'd been dancing with spotted me looking lost by the road and offered me a lift to Worthing where a pick up the train I would have been on anyway.

Other than that, I seem to have unintentionally made a good attempt at trying to knock out Graham's teeth (although thankfully I failed).

All in all, I don't think last night is in the running for the most successful dance out I've ever been on and maybe it's just safest if I just avoid Angmering entirely in the future. It was a well organised evening though and fun enough to compensate for my incompetence.

Wildhunt are having their Day of Dance tomorrow. We'll be dancing from around 12 noon to around 4 pm at the Inn On The Pond in Nutfield.

It will be my first dance out with them for about 1.5 - 2 years.

I've only been to one practice since then, so this could be interesting...