The Cheerful Insanity of Me

As, I've said many times on here, although I disagree entirely with the views of facists, I respect that they have a right to express those views. As such I tend to ignore most anti-facist groups as a lot of them seem focused on attacking this right rather than the views themselves.

Therefore when invites to join Folk against Facism came around on Facebook and promptly ignored them the same as I do with anything like that.

It turns out the comments mentioned in the prevous post are connected with this and the BNPs plans to use folk as an English tradition to promote their views. Was also provide with a link to this article, which includes the quote:

It's an ancient Jewish paranoia of mine. For some reason, whenever I see Morris dancers I assume a pogrom can't be far behind.

Where on earth did that come from? Especially given that, as far as I can tell, December 2007 predates all this BNP latching onto folk stuff.

Anyway, this brings me back to the point, which side of the speaking out against facism vs facists rights to express their views line do Folk against Facism stand. The answer is I'm really not sure.

Their website is unhelpfully "coming soon" and their facebook group seems a bit ambiguous on this issue.

However, their press coverage so far (which seems to be more than the BNP actually got), seems to be mainly about them promoting the fact they don't share the facist views, so maybe they are the right side of the line? If they are then I wholeheartedly support what they do.

Yesterday was fun.

Was a bit worrying at first when at 10.05 I seemed to be the only Gog there 10 minutes before the procession. Hoddeston offered me a kazoo, so I could process on my own though. The rest of the side arrived shortly after that though, so I didn't have to resort to that.

It was the first time they'd asked me to call a procession, which was quite fun and seemed to go reasonably well (we didn't have a lot of music, so it was a little difficult to hear). Not sure what the rest of the side thought of it, but I was fairly happy with my calling for it. We seemed to keep a fairly consistent distance from the team in front, did a reasonable number of figures where there were large bunches of audience and they all seemed to hear me ok.

We did our spot in the main display, which seemed to go ok. It was a bit of a shame that the audience had thinned out a bit by then though (then again, that will partially be the sides earlier in the display disappearing off and it's difficult to maintain interest of shoppers for 9 dances).

The rest of the afternoon was a fairly relaxed affair going around with Bedfordshire Lace and St Alban's Morris Men. The spots were only 30 minutes, so we got about 3 dances at each. I wasn't convinced by some of the spots as Christopher Place and especially outside the Cathedral seemed to be away from the crowds (there was pretty much literally no-one but us at the latter), but then there are limits on where you would be allowed to dance and the market was taking up most of the main shopping area in the city centre.

Had lunch between the displays and the first spot, so during the actual lunchbreak I ran off to the amazing tea shop next to tourist information, which morganmuffle has introduced me to when I went up there in May, and dragged half of Molly with me. Actually, I think I managed to drag all of Molly, but only half stayed for tea, the other half opting for the pub instead (admittedly a difficult choice).

Turns out it's a really good thing to post details of where we'll be dancing on here, as jinglebellafeed turned up at the Cathedral spot bearing many ice-lollies. If you ever want to know how to make molly dancers happy that's a good way of doing it *subtle hint for anyone else reading this*

We only did one dance at the last spot, as people had to run off, but it was quite interesting to see Wicket Brood doing a version of the Mississippi Mud Dance (one we nicked ourselves from Ouse Washes), but with Sticks in Border Style.

To make things even better the weather remained hot and sunny until we finished dancing and only then did it start the thunderstorm :-)

Stomp were amazing as ever in the evening.

All in all a good day and I seemed to have endless amounts of energy. Still seemed to have plenty left after the whole day of dancing, plus the 4.5 mile walk back home from St Pancras. Think I must be getting fitter again, which has got to be a good thing given I was feeling a bit unfit dancing back in April.

Feeling more tired today, but it's more "lack of sleep" tired rather than "lots of dancing" tired, which also makes sense as I can only have got around 5 hours of Friday night and didn't get home and to bed until about 3 am last night.

Rounded off the weekend with a trip around the Tower with miriammoules today, which was nice. Once again, managed to escape without having my head cut off, which has also got to be a good thing.

There seems to be a thing going round facebook at the moment with people listing what they're thankful for each day for a month, perhaps I should just be thankful for not having my head cut off each day for a month... That is rather reliant on me not having my head cut off though, so I guess as I can't tell the future I'll leave it, especially given Thrales will probably make attempts on it. *crosses fingers and acquires large amounts of duct tap just in case*

Then again, perhaps I'd get a sainthood the same as Alban did for having his cut off? Do you think they'll mind that I'm not Christian like he was?

NEXT TIME ON THE WEEKEND LIFE OF A hmmm_tea: Touring the Borough with Thrales on Friday, followed with being at Paddington at 7.45 am on Saturday morning (ouch!) to go off to Chepstow for the weekend dancing with Wild Hunt.

Just spotted this via a friend on facebook:



The Robot Zoo at the Horniman Museum (I've never actually been the Museum itself inspite of living a few stops down the line for about 3 years)

Will have to work out a free day to pop down to Forest Hill to see this.

In other news, I now have a fanclub on facebook :-)

It's very exclusive, currently consisting only of me.

I'm not sure I can take the fame *faints dramatically*

Facebook presented me with the following this morning:

Hello Owen, do you speak English (UK)?

Close

Help translate Facebook into English (UK) so that it can be used by people all over the world, in all languages.

Click on the Translate Facebook button to add the Translations application, developed by Facebook so that you can be part of the community of translators.

I wish to participate in Facebook's language translation project and I agree to the Additional Terms Applicable to Translate Facebook

Obviously, American English causes problems for us in the UK