Floating down to Camelot

We've just got back from a weekend on the mainland, first in Southampton, and then in its great enemy, Portsmouth.

( More )

When singing to myself casually around the house, I seem to be incapable of singing Deck the halls without suddenly finding myself singing words from Men of Harlech. "Hurl the reeling horsemen over! Falalalala lalalala! Let the earth dead foemen cover! Falalalala lalala!" I am not entirely sure if this is an improvement, or not. But it is at least more jolly than Pellinor's habit of singing While Shepherds Watched not to the tune of Ilkley Moor, like normal people do, but to the tune of The House of the Rising Sun.

I've never done a music first lines quiz before, partly because I still haven't got around to putting most of my CDs onto my computer, and partly because most of the songs are traditional ones that I didn't think many people would know. But I've given it a go this time, though I had to do a lot of skipping, to get past instrumentals, songs where the title was right there in the first line (absolutely loads of them) and things that seemed particularly obscure. Over half of these are indeed traditional folk songs, but there's also some other stuff, too.

As ever with these things, you need to identify the song, though with most of the traditional songs, the artist is immaterial, unless it's an artist who did a particularly unique version of the trad. song. I'm screening comments to stop Pellinor leaping in and revealing the answers to all of them right at the start.

( Songs for guessing )

A few weeks ago, I asked for ideas on what to wear for circus-themed fancy dress. I didn't go in fancy dress in the end, but about a quarter of the audience did. I can therefore report that the key component of a circus-themed fancy dress outfit is a top hat. The top hat is ideally worn with a corset and a tutu, but can go with just about anything, and is in itself enough to brand you as a circus person. Failing a top hat, one needs to wear a large floppy ruff. The truly adventurous don a golden mane.

Anyone got any ideas for what I could wear for this year's Bellowhead New Year event, which is circus themed? They encourage - but certainly don't compel - people to come in appropriate costume. I don't want to buy or hire costume, since that rather goes against the grain, given the amount of costume we possess between us. Has anyone got any ideas for something that loosely fits a circusy theme, but isn't a clown costume? It would ideally be something that could be put together using a costume repertoire that is largely medievalish and Morrisy.

Perhaps the traditional songs require a little tweaking today:

Hal-an-tog! Jolly rumble-og!
In comes cat! What a soggy moggy!
I guess this means it's raining
And we will get quite soggy!
Hail the British summer -
Chill and damp and foggy.


Happy May Morning, anyway. Happy summer! Now to clad myself in that traditional garb for welcoming in the May: hat, gloves, scarf and waterproof coat.

We have a double CD that contains over 60 original recordings from the 50s British skiffle explosion. "Why are they all about trains?" I asked when I first listened to it. Many months later, Pellinor came in when I had one of the CDs in. "What are you listen-- Oh, it's about a train: it must be skiffle." Closer listening reveals that are not all about trains, but a surprisingly large number are. If they're not about real trains, they're about metaphorical ones, and if they're not about metaphorical ones, they're about bandits who rob trains. Even some songs that I'd originally assumed were about miners (e.g. John Henry; Drill, ye tarriers, drill) turn out to be about people building railroads.

Why this obsession with trains? Since most of the skiffle repertoire consists of American folk or blues songs, why do trains crop up so much in these? Is it because America is so much bigger than Britain, so the coming of the railroads had a much bigger impact, worthy of being immortalised in song? Is it because a new and expanding country wanted folk songs that reflected their own daily life, rather than old imported songs centred in rural British life? (British folk songs definitely found their way to America. Loads of traditional British ballads were collected by folklorists in the Appalachians, for example.)

And why so few trains in the British folk song repertoire? I've been idly thinking all day, and I can't come up with a single one. I've come up with one about road building and one about canal building. I've come up with various songs about highway robbery, but none about train robbery. There are loads of songs about sea travel, and a goodly amount about shipwrecks, but where are the songs about railway travel or awful Victorian rail disasters?

Or are there hundreds of British train-related folk songs that will cause me to go, "Of course! How could I have forgotten that?" when people point them out?

According to BBC radio news, some professor has "just discovered" a rather amazing fact: many well-known carols and Christmas hymns used to be sung to different tunes. "While Shepherds Watched," he says, used to be sung to a wide variety of folk tunes, of which the most popular was the tune of Ilkley Moor. Wow! What an amazing and radical new discovery this is!

I possess several CDs in which various folk groups sing well-known Christmas words to their old traditional folk tunes. My mixed Morris side does the same. We sing "While Shepherds Watched" to a wide variety of folk tunes, of which the most popular is the tune of Ilkley Moor.

If only any of us had realised that any of this was actually news, we could all be rich and famous by now.

I might as well put these in the same post, since I suppose they're both broadly about "native" traditions vs. cosmopolitan ones.

1. Journeys along the A31/A35 always used to be enlivened by the "Great Wall of Dorset," which always caused me to say "what on earth is behind it? I must look it up one day." Several journeys later, I actually remembered to do so, so then the cry became, "Agh, I looked that up. What was its name, again?" (Answer: Charborough Estate, bounded by "one of the longest brick walls in England", and home of the wonderfully-named Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax family.)

Anyway... in recent years, the great wall has been gradually supplanted by the excitements of the western end of the Dorchester by-pass, where every journey seems to bring a new wonder. There's an Italianate campanile, a Romanesque or Byzantine basilica and a Greek temple, just for starters, and new things have appeared every visit. "Is it a theme park?" we wondered. "What next in this tour of world archicture? A ziggurat? The hanging gardens of Babylon?" After several years of failing to remember to look it up when we got home, this time we remembered, and apparently it's Poundbury - a large new town built on principles set forward by Prince Charles.

Now, it does seem to me a little bit odd to see an Italian campanile rising above the fields of Dorset. Should it seem odd? The landscape is littered with eighteenth-century great houses inspired by Classical designs, after all, so such things are hardly new. But Prince Charles condemns modern buildings and modern archicture for being blots on the landscape, so should he perhaps be advocating the building of houses that fit in with the landscape, being built with local stone and in local styles? (This isn't a rhetical question; I really don't know how I feel about it.) Should the buildings at least have a unified feel, rather than being a random mish-mash of European styles from all over the place? And if, as the Wikipedia article says, they're building houses with bricked-in windows, so they look like old houses that had their windows bricked in to avoid window tax several hundred years ago, can this be seen as taking things a little too far? I bet the Victorians didn't build their neo-Gothic churches pre-dirtied, with chipped-off bits of statues, to make them look centuries old.


2. Secondly, I was interested in this article about songs by folk musicians being used by the BNP. The thing is, I saw the song Roots as being very contrary to the view that the BNP presents. To me (and, it seems, to the writer) it's all about wanting to rediscover and celebrate English traditions, in the same way that pretty much every other country in the world happily celebrates their own... but without it having any hint of xenophobia, racism or jingoism. The key lines to me are the ones that I've always heard as "We've lost St George and the Union Jack / It's my flag, too, and I want it back," which I see as a protest against the fact that these things have become appropriated by racists. I see the song not just as a wish that the English wouldn't scorn their traditions, but as an attack on those who use those traditions for racist and xenophobic purposes. Not, of course, that one would expect the BNP to see things in the same way, but, still...


EDIT: It was, perhaps, rather foolish to make a post on a contraversial issue when feeling ill. My cold's gone solidly to my chest and head, and I'm getting emotional about silly things. Don't feel you have to hold back in comments on my account, but my ability to make coherent replies might be hampered.

It's quite unusual for the sun to rise on May Morning. Well, actually, I suspect that it's actually fairly common for the sun to rise on May Morning, and that May Mornings when the sun doesn't rise at all have probably been few and far between over the years, but it is, however, fairly unusual for us to see the sun rising. It seemed very slow coming this year, and I began to suspect that it was deliberately lurking just below the horizon, sniggering into its hand as it listened to us launch into yet another song while waiting. (Or maybe it just doesn't like Morris dancing.) However, come it did... for all of 3 minutes, until it was eaten by a low cloud and the encroaching sea fog.

( Photographic evidence )

We went Wassailing on Saturday. As dusk fell on a frosty orchard, a full moon slowly took shape through hazy clouds, and a flock of rook circled overhead, heading for the trees. The grass was thick with frost, and the air was biting, with all the branches thick with white.

The keyword was cold. All the men immediately started prodding fires, trying to get them to burn well, and then prodding some more, because they were men and man bring fire. A miscommunication about time meant that we arrived an hour before we were needed, so the women slowly froze, feet turning into blocks of ice within the inadequate insulation of wooden clogs.

The Wassail itself involved some song and some chanting, before the apple trees were decked with cider-soaked toast, and cider was sprinkled around its roots. Quite why apple trees will be encouraged by being smeared in the crushed, fermented corpses of their relatives, I do not know, but it's Tradition, so who are we to question the psychology of apple trees? Much noise was made with pots and pans and sticks, and perhaps the evil spirits were driven away, or perhaps they weren't; I was too cold to stick around and watch, and retreated to the fireside for beef and ale stew.

We spent the long weekend at Hastings Jack in the Green Festival, which involved:
- much cider, much ice cream and some slightly fatal carafes of wine
- sneaky spaghetti which had conned me into ordering it by masquerading as mere "pasta", then proceeded to sit there cackling as I failed utterly to persuade it onto a fork
- accidentally walking in on a man in the toilet. Oops.
- spectacularly inept application of sun cream
- Pellinor (there as an other half / pack animal, not as a dancer) running away with some wraggle taggle pink Morris people for hours and hours and HOURS, and probably doing more dancing than I did
- some people who clearly thought that green body paint is an acceptable alternative to clothing
- green, green, GREEN, everywhere green
- witnessing an arrest. Really, Being Bad when there are 12 police men within 20 yards, all ready to marshal the start of a long procession, is not clever
- the buying of lots of second hand books and a swirly skirt
- an underground car park with the best echo in the world. Chicken on a Raft works particularly well in it. I'm not sure what the humans and bikers thought, though.
- a sea gull with a very accurate aim. Also, fortunately, a sun hat that was heroically willing to take the bullet meant for me
- Pellinor being mistaken for a pirate, Dick Turpin, a fop, Lord Nelson, Amadeus, a Venetian assassin etc etc., and being stopped for more photographs than us bona fide dancers. Show off!
- Pellinor having a Late Night Adventure which he's promised to blog about

( Some pictures )

Yes, yes, I know I'm predictable. I've said it all before, but... but...! I went to a dance practice tonight in the room above a pub, and the pub was heaving. Packed with people, full of green and shamrocks and special offers on Guinness. Now, leaving aside the fact that it isn't actually St Patrick's Day today, due to the whole "cancelled it if clashes with Holy Week" thing, here we have an English pub, in England, in which I bet well nigh a hundred percent of the people inside were English, absolutely packed for St Patrick's Day. Fair enough. I have no objection to them doing this. I have no objection to them celebrating St Andrew's Day and St David's Day, and any special day from any other world culture that they want to celebrate. I'm all for multiculturalism and diversity... but I just wish that there could be at least some attempt to celebrate the English special day and reclaim it from the racists and the xenophobes and the aggressive patriots.

I bet this pub won't be doing special offers on local real ales on St George's Day, or putting roses on the wall. It bet they won't be playing English folk music in the background. I bet they won't invite Morris dancers to perform. It's quite incredible how the English have managed to neglect, or even laugh at, their own traditions and folk culture. That leaves a gap that the racists can step in and fill, and make it so that standing up and saying, "hey, my country has some rather nice traditions, actually, and I'd rather like to celebrate them" gets heard as "my country right or wrong, and down with the rest." A couple of years ago, BBC radio's special St George's day programming was a concert with music from Wales, Scotland and Ireland... because to play English music would be jingoistic, I presume, so not allowed.

Anyway... Yes, I've said it all before. I just need to quote Roots again, though:

( Roots lyrics )

Just got back from a day dancing at the Bestival, the smaller of the two local pop festivals. It bills itself as being quirky and different (hence inviting Morris dancers), so I have no idea how representative it is of its kind, but that didn't stop me making some nice, sweeping generalisations on the differences between folk festivals and pop festivals.

( Festivals - a spotter's guide )

Back from Spankfest Spanfest, which was very very good.

( Much dancing, much dancing... Too much cider, too little sleep. )

A slightly amended version of a popular folk song:

It was pleasant and delightful on a midsummer morn,
All things were quite silent - and then came the dawn.
Then blackbirds and thrushes sang on every green spray,
And the larks they sang cacophonous: how I wish they'd go away.
And the larks they sang cacophonous
And the larks they sang cacophonous
And the larks they sang cacophonous -
How I wish they'd go away!

(Although, actually, the problem wasn't so much the birds, as the cats. They seem to have decided that the dawn chorus is a challenge to feline kind, and they sit there in the hall singing as loudly as they can, in a, "Hey! We can do that, too!" sort of fashion. Maybe the world of nature is holding their own version of Pop Idol, and we don't know it. I hope the final happens while we're in Scotland, and we return to silent cats.)

I missed out an apt line from folk song yesterday:
My hat it is frozen to my head,
My feet they are like a lump of lead.

At present, I am sitting here at work, in a building that is assailed on all sides by wind, and cowering under a black and menacing sky. (The poor red squirrels are having a very challenging time trying to leap from branch to branch. It's become an extreme sport.) In an hour, I need to head into the direction of the worst of the blackness to go walking with dinosaurs. This walk will take place on the beach, near a very windy headland. If you never hear from me again...

And it gets worse. Tomorrow is Walk the Wight - a 28 mile sponsored walk across the whole length of the island, in which 6000 happy souls (5% of the population of the island!) wander in the sunshine through glorious scenery. Well, have you seen the forecast? Our mixed Morris team is going one better once again, and Dancing the Wight - i.e. doing it in relay, and dancing at every checkpoint. (I wanted to Mum the Wight - i.e. do it in our Mummers' Play costume, and perform the play in installments at each checkpoint, with proper cliffhangers. Strangely, no-one else agreed. I think it was the idea of having to carry the Turkish Knight's "corpse" for 6 miles that put them off.) Pellinor intends to do the whole 28 miles again, ideally avoiding falling into rivers this time. Last year, the local paper was rude about us. This year, I think we'll be upstaged by the chicken. ( Chicken interlude )

To make matters worse, my water-proof isn't. I think the dinosaur walk needs to take a diversion past Millets. I'm sure I can come up with some way to con the children into thinking it's a proper dinosaury place.

I've heard it said that, in America, they actually cancel things if it rains, or reschedule them to another day. How odd (if true.) (Alternatively, how completely sensible.) It must be strange to live in a culture that doesn't doggedly struggle on with summer fairs and walks despite torrential downpours, floods, gails and sub-zero temperatures.

EDIT: I was driving home over the Downs behind an open-top double-decker bus, that was very nicely decorated. "Island breezes", it read. I do like this very English mode of looking on the bright side, and making a virtue out of the discomfort. I think it should be extended to other things, like boats and horse-drawn carriages and the like. "The English Rain Drop experience!" Tourists will be queuing up in droves.

Happy summer!

The plan was to post a happy May Day song at 4 a.m. ("We were up long before the day-o!"), then post pictures of the sun a-rising when I got back at 7. However, since I'm ill, I tossed and turned sleeplessly until 2, got up and pottered on the computer for a bit, then went back to bed. I'd just begun to feel dozy, when a suspicious noise led me to an Adventure with a Mouse (that had an as-yet-unresolved cliffhanger ending.) Still awake at 4, when Pellinor went out. Still awake at 5. Still awake at 5.45. But 6.45 came quickly, and I clearly remember being at Kentwell and then at a folk festival on a canal, so I must have finally slept. Can't skive off work; got to give a lecture to a group of childcare students. Wish I could. Skive, that is.

It's particularly vexing because the sun really did rise today, after years of rain, mist, fog or haze. And there was more singing than normal. Pellinor skipped the group breakfast since he has to get to work early, so at least he couldn't do bacon-related gloating. The sun-related gloating would be bad enough, except that he's also adding in moon-related gloating, too.

I'm too tired to do a proper folklore post. Suffice it to say that there's a lot of it around. Folklore, that is.

( Pellinor's scant two pictures taken on the last dying breath of the camera battery )

Happy summer, all! (Although, this year, we feel that some imposters have been plying their wares round these here parts. As everyone knows, the summer only happens because the noble Morris men get up at dawn and heroically dance to bring in the sunshine. If they didn't dance, then where would be be? However, since it's been summer for around six weeks, we can only conclude that some pretend Morris dancers came along and conned the sunshine into thinking that March 21st was the traditional start of summer, did a dance, and fled.)

It's really great having a folklore calendar in the kitchen. There I am, busy with cooking, when I happen to notice a phrase like "pea eating customs in the north-east of England" (March 25th, by the way), and then I have to rush off to find more in the folklore books, and then I have to read up on the rest of the months, and before I know it, Pellinor has finished making dinner.

So here are the results of this month's distraction: ( Folklore in March )

I now need to get ready for the annual Morris Men's feast. I declined the offer of a lift, on the grounds that I might enjoy the feast a bit more if I drink, but I will enjoy tomorrow a whole lot more if I don't. Pellinor is not under the same restriction. I am anticipating much singing later.

This weekend, we went to the Straw Bear in Whittlesey (or Whittlesea), near Peterborough. ( Straw Bear - long account, with digressions on folklore and fens )

All in all, it was a good weekend. I knew I'd enjoy it in the end, even though, beforehand, all I wanted was a quiet weekend in. I'm back at work this afternoon, but have the morning off.