Thaxted Ring Meeting
Jun. 5th, 2006 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
king_pellinorWell that was fun weekend. Up to Thaxted for the Meeting of the Morris Ring. Some quick memories of the weekend:
- Turning up at the Rose and Crown at 5 o'clock on the Friday night. No-one else around at all, and the staff practically fell over themselves to serve us. "We've been expecting hordes of morris men all afternoon, where are they?". It soon got a bit fuller ;-)
- Nipping into a small hall in the pub (a closed off entrance, I think) to phone home, only to get cornered in there and poked by someone from the Morris Dance Discussion List. Be careful what you say on-line, it might come back to haunt you :-D
- Lots of singing, until about 4 on Friday. I'm not sure what we sang or where, though.
- Food was done by the dinner staff at the school we were staying in. Saturday morning, going in to breakfast: "Are you OK?" says one kindly, "you look a bit lost. Here, hold this plate. Now, would you like some bacon?" I felt like I was 5 years old again.
- Utrecht Morris Men: very good team, fun to be around and enthusiastic in their dancing.
- Weather was perfect: sun, no clouds, and just enough of a breeze every now and then to not be too hot.
- We only had 6 dancers, one of whom had a dodgy tendon and couldn't dance. So I'd just call a dance, get our 5 men up, and bully the onlooking teams until we got a sixth. Sometimes I ended up with two full sides :-)
- Paul the Ring Squire's son: very kindly filled in for us as sixth man for our display dances. On reflection maybe I should have asked someone who dances the same traditions as us *in the same way* (as I knew from Morris 18-30s that he didn't), but he picked it up very quickly.
- Thaxted lay on afternoon tea after the tours finish but before the massed dancing. The food's very welcome, but it doesn't leave much room for the feast.
- Massed dancing in the evening is a great experience: you get a huge crowd of well-behaved respectful people who've come specially to watch the dancing. I held the finish of our dance for a few beats before leading off, so we could appreciate the applause - marvellous.
- On the other hand, it does cut the feast short and it seems hard to get a session going again - the pubs are full of public, so you can't get settled so easily. There were very few people still around at midnight.
- We still got some very good dancing done, though. Everyone was just sitting around enjoying themselves, so being a squire I couldn't have that and I dug out a musician to play me Nutting Girl. OK, he didn't play it the way I dance it, but we got by :-) That then got full-blown dancing kicked off, including Monck's March (people tried to do it with hankies, but we sorted that out) and Swaggering Boney (glasses fell off and broke, but I got a quick kiss out of it), among many others.
- Sunday I spent blind, due to lack of glasses, but that didn't have much effect. No-one can see what they're doing in those massed dances anyway :-D
And so home, to wonder why my legs are a bit stiff. Must be from being cramped up in the back seat of a car for 3 1/2 hours on the way back. Oh, that reminds me - never get a lift from Mikey again: he only gets annoyed when you point out that he's in the lane marked "London" when we're on our way *off* the M25, and that going from Winchester to Southampton vis Portsmouth isn't the conventional route, and so on. I think he suspects us of deliberately rebuilding the roads in order to annoy him.
One of our team didn't go because he thinks that the Thaxted men don't really get excited over the Ring meeting the way everyone else does - as they do it every year it's just another routine chore. I can see what he means, to an extent, but I think it only applies to a few of the men and everyone else there is up for a good time. Actually, the only thing I think bothers me about Thaxted is not that they do the meeting every year but that they take every opportunity to remind you of the fact, and that they started Ring meetings before there was a Ring, and they were a Founder Side, and so on... Mind you, I shouldn't object to people being proud.
So, I have today off to recover. Actually it's more just to be lazy, having spent this weekend at Thaxted and last weekend at Wightfrag. So I now have a full day to do all things I'd normally do on a Saturday, like... er... well, I'll think of something.
- Turning up at the Rose and Crown at 5 o'clock on the Friday night. No-one else around at all, and the staff practically fell over themselves to serve us. "We've been expecting hordes of morris men all afternoon, where are they?". It soon got a bit fuller ;-)
- Nipping into a small hall in the pub (a closed off entrance, I think) to phone home, only to get cornered in there and poked by someone from the Morris Dance Discussion List. Be careful what you say on-line, it might come back to haunt you :-D
- Lots of singing, until about 4 on Friday. I'm not sure what we sang or where, though.
- Food was done by the dinner staff at the school we were staying in. Saturday morning, going in to breakfast: "Are you OK?" says one kindly, "you look a bit lost. Here, hold this plate. Now, would you like some bacon?" I felt like I was 5 years old again.
- Utrecht Morris Men: very good team, fun to be around and enthusiastic in their dancing.
- Weather was perfect: sun, no clouds, and just enough of a breeze every now and then to not be too hot.
- We only had 6 dancers, one of whom had a dodgy tendon and couldn't dance. So I'd just call a dance, get our 5 men up, and bully the onlooking teams until we got a sixth. Sometimes I ended up with two full sides :-)
- Paul the Ring Squire's son: very kindly filled in for us as sixth man for our display dances. On reflection maybe I should have asked someone who dances the same traditions as us *in the same way* (as I knew from Morris 18-30s that he didn't), but he picked it up very quickly.
- Thaxted lay on afternoon tea after the tours finish but before the massed dancing. The food's very welcome, but it doesn't leave much room for the feast.
- Massed dancing in the evening is a great experience: you get a huge crowd of well-behaved respectful people who've come specially to watch the dancing. I held the finish of our dance for a few beats before leading off, so we could appreciate the applause - marvellous.
- On the other hand, it does cut the feast short and it seems hard to get a session going again - the pubs are full of public, so you can't get settled so easily. There were very few people still around at midnight.
- We still got some very good dancing done, though. Everyone was just sitting around enjoying themselves, so being a squire I couldn't have that and I dug out a musician to play me Nutting Girl. OK, he didn't play it the way I dance it, but we got by :-) That then got full-blown dancing kicked off, including Monck's March (people tried to do it with hankies, but we sorted that out) and Swaggering Boney (glasses fell off and broke, but I got a quick kiss out of it), among many others.
- Sunday I spent blind, due to lack of glasses, but that didn't have much effect. No-one can see what they're doing in those massed dances anyway :-D
And so home, to wonder why my legs are a bit stiff. Must be from being cramped up in the back seat of a car for 3 1/2 hours on the way back. Oh, that reminds me - never get a lift from Mikey again: he only gets annoyed when you point out that he's in the lane marked "London" when we're on our way *off* the M25, and that going from Winchester to Southampton vis Portsmouth isn't the conventional route, and so on. I think he suspects us of deliberately rebuilding the roads in order to annoy him.
One of our team didn't go because he thinks that the Thaxted men don't really get excited over the Ring meeting the way everyone else does - as they do it every year it's just another routine chore. I can see what he means, to an extent, but I think it only applies to a few of the men and everyone else there is up for a good time. Actually, the only thing I think bothers me about Thaxted is not that they do the meeting every year but that they take every opportunity to remind you of the fact, and that they started Ring meetings before there was a Ring, and they were a Founder Side, and so on... Mind you, I shouldn't object to people being proud.
So, I have today off to recover. Actually it's more just to be lazy, having spent this weekend at Thaxted and last weekend at Wightfrag. So I now have a full day to do all things I'd normally do on a Saturday, like... er... well, I'll think of something.
