Interests meme

[ladyofastolat]

I'm duty manager today. This means that - unless the phone rings with news that a library is burning down - I get to spend a whole day at my desk with no interruptions, getting on with some serious work.

Alternatively, it means that I can spend the time doing this...

LJ Interests meme results

1. baldur's gate:
   I have played Baldur's Gate 2 so many, many times, and the original game a good few times, too. It was the first computer gate that I truly obsessed over, and I have yet to find a game to beat it. It was also my first RPG of any kind. I'd always wanted to play D&D when I was at school, but no-one I knew was into that sort of thing. Playing BG reminded me of that, and now I'm finally playing such games with real humans, too.
2. cats:
   When I was tiny, my mum would desperately point out all the dogs we passed, but I would totally ignore them, and just cry, "Cat!" (Well, actually, I cried "an-yan-yah!", since I spoke a language of my own, and that was my word for cat, for some reason.) Yes, I was obsessed. I'm not obsessed now, but I still like them a lot, and have two of my own, called "Honey-and-Precious-we-didn't-name-them!"
3. cotswold morris:
   When I was about 11, I watched some Cotswold Morris dancers, and I said "I want to be a Morris man when I grow up." Sadly, I can never be a Morris Man. I would, though, still love to dance Cotswold one day.
4. english folklore:
   What can I say? I'm just very interested in it, and always have been. I love folk tales, folk songs, customs, traditions... Everything, really.
5. folk dance:
   EDIT: Doh! I was given 11 interests, and told to fill in about ten of them. This was the one I left blank, since there's lots more dancing interests on this list. No. 11 was "Tolkien", which I did fill in. Oh well... I shouldn't really edit it further now, since I've already wasted far too much time today.
6. george r r martin:
   Ooh! My favourite author! I discovered him by accident last year. It took me a while to get hooked, but I ended up obsessed. I've been nearly twenty years saying, "Lord of the Rings, I suppose" when asked what my favourite book is, but now I have a new answer. Only a month to go before the next book comes out!
7. les barker:
   A genius. I urge anyone who's not seen him perform to look at the schedules for local folk clubs and folk festivals, and go to see him. He does poems, which are funny when read, but hilarious when he delivers them in his totally deadpan, downtrodden northern way. Cosmo the fairly-accurate knife thrower; Jason and the Arguments; Spot of the Antarctic; "I've got an occasional table..."
8. morris dancing:
   I am a morris dancer, and proud of it. I can rant for hours about how unfair it is that everyone thinks morris dancing is sad... yet happily pay to watch local folk dancing when they're on holiday in other countries. It has great tunes, great dances, and you meet lots of great people. Plus, morris dancers tend to love singing and drinking, too, which adds to the fun.
9. playford:
   One of the dance groups we're in aims to do "all the traditional dance styles the other sides on the island don't do." Playford is one - i.e. dances written down by John Playford in the seventeenth century, in "The Dancing Master". I'm not very good at it - I don't do elegant well, and I giggle, especially when I look at Pellinor's "stately and elegant" expression that he puts on when we do these dances. It's nice, though, to dance something from instructions written 350 years ago.
10. st george:
    Our mixed dance group goes out to dinner for St George's Day, to show that you can celebrate English traditions and identity without it having to be jingoistic and horrible. Pellinor plays St George in our mummers' play. And I just like pictures of St George and the dragon, and have several of them around the house, including a Greek icon, a cross-stitch, and some hand puppets.

Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.

Comments

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

So why don't you dance Cotswold then? No sides nearby?

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

That's right. The only local Cotswold side is men only. I live on the Isle of Wight, so I can't just travel a bit, in order to join a not-quite-local side.

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

Not enough interest to start a womens side then?

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

It's not so much an interest thing. It's rather that there's a feeling that Cotswold is claimed - that we'd be treading on the toes (as it were!) of the Men if we started dancing "their" style of dances. A women's side was set up some years after the original men's side, but chose to do north-west instead. When a mixed side was set up a few years, it was with the stated aim of dancing any English tradition we could lay our hands on... except for those that another island side already danced.

What sort of dancing do you do, then?

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

Ah... yes.. I see the problem. I suppose there's always workshops at festivals to allow you to dip your feet in it occationally though...

I dance border, molly, rapper and then whatever else is going on nearby...

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Ooh, a morris-dancing 25 year-old.

Interested in Morris 18-30 (http://www.morris1830.org/home/) at all?

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

Already off to Tenterden with Wild Hunt next weekend and Sheffield with Gogs the weekend afterwards, so not sure funds will stretch to Leeds as well...

...sounds fun though...

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Wild Hunt... Were you at Christchurch in 2003? I have a vague feeling that we danced alongside you at some spot or other there

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

They might well have been. I only joined them when I moved down to London at Easter and wanted a side a bit closer than Cambridge...