Chez Spud

I’ve had to cheat for this week’s assignment, although I am well practiced in the art of cheating of course. I sallied forth in to the Big Town ready to snap ‘Music’, but it seems the people of Ipswich were feeling quiet and contemplative today…the music man was definitley not ‘down our way’ today.

So here is a view from my corner a few weeks ago …a very British celebration of May Day including morris dancing and maypole dancing. I absolutely LOVE morris dancing and wish I’d been born a man so I could grow a really funky beard and join in.

It’s very hard to explain morris dancing. It involves grown men dressing up with ribbons on their socks and then doing synchronised handkerchief waving (ideally clean ones)

then kind of skipping around a bit

and then beating each other with sticks

Pretty odd huh? In most normal places such activities would be considered somewhat ‘fringe’, verging on the illegal even or at least confined to dingy basement bars at the wrong end of town. Not so here and thus respectable, upstanding members of the community get to dress up and indulge in sado-masochistic beviour in full public view at the weekend. Only in England.

So the music? It tends to be folksy, of course, and generally involves a fiddle or two and an accordion. This troupe had some kind of homemade stringed instrument too – surely he knocked this up in his shed?

Also, it’s imperative that the band get all boozed up during the dancing. And it must be Real Ale, on the warm side. That is The Law.

But if you think that lot were on the eccentric side, check out the next act, the maypole dancers. Seriously, I have never EVER seen such outfits, it was like watching a road traffic accident. My eyes, my eyes…

It’s the stuff of nightmares…run for your lives!

 

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