Clog Tired

You should make a point of trying every experience once,

excepting incest and folk dancing.

Arnold Bax (1883-1953)

IN ANOTHER LIFE, a fairly recent one, I would, from time to time, review the arts. This was in Bermuda, for the weekly newspaper, the Mid-Ocean News, that has recently been put out of business by the machinations of Bermuda’s dictatorial government. Now and then I’d write a review for the daily paper, the Royal Gazette, which is now in the cross-hairs and, I believe, struggling.

I had no training as an arts critic, or as a journalist of any kind. I’d failed my “O” Level English the first go round. I had been an amateur painter, very amateur. However, artistic ability does run in my family, both sides. I should not be allowed a paintbrush, but decades of writing letters made me dare to pick up the sword. I mean pen.

The Mid-Ocean News had an arts critic, and rather a good one. She died. I applied. Eventually I received $100 a pop and a pair of free tickets if I was to look in on live theatre or music. I simply wrote down my own personal impressions of the exhibition, the musical, the dramatic presentation, and I think I was honest and did not ever try to gild a turnip.

Well, that is history. And before I continue, a few words about beginning a remark with the word well. When interviewed, many (perhaps most) will reply to a question with “Well ...” and that’s frowned upon. I know that full well, but thought I’d bring it up here so that you know how to respond the next time a television or newspaper reporter approaches you and asks if you have anything to say about the show. Don’t say: “Well ... it was rubbish.” Just say: “It was rubbish.” Or you might roll your eyes heavenward and say: “Rubbish!” Or smile widely and cry: “Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!”

I was in Alnwick yesterday with some friends, under mostly sunny skies. This is unusual during the Alnwick International Music Festival, an annual event, which began yesterday in the Market Square. Seems to me that in recent years I’ve had to dodge degrees of rain and some of the performances have been moved inside with a resultant smaller seating situation and all the fuss of setting up the sound equipment again at short notice.

The host at yesterday’s afternoon performance told a large crowd the very same jokes to fill the gaps that he told a year ago, and two years ago. They were not original jokes when they entered his repertoire. Advice from me: Retire the one about the lady hugging the frozen cows, thus saving their lives, in wintry fields. You know the one: the mysterious lady’s name turns out to be Thora Hird. There are many tourists at the Alnwick Music Festival, and I dare say Dame Thora is a complete stranger to them. “Must be Geordie humour?” For Pete’s sake, Thora was from Morecambe, Lancashire. Not one of ours. The little children, the locals, won’t get it either. The host, by the way, is the Town Crier. He was not dressed up like Sergeant Pepper, but in clothes that made me think he’d been fishing. Nice clothes, but country-country, not country-town. Perhaps this is his take on folk? The same clothes (I’m not sure about his undergarments) right down to (up to?) his hat that he wore in 2009.

The main event yesterday afternoon was a group of Dutch dancers called De Speelluden. Is that not a wonderful word to roll off the tongue? De Speelluden. The group was formed in 1967, but they are hardly Sixties rock and roll. What these men and women do is perform the peasant dances of the Westervoort part of the Netherlands that were customary back in about 1900.

The men dressed in black uniforms that made me think of railway employees as depicted in the movies, complete with watch-chains. Railway employees anywhere in the West, from Santa Fé to the Swiss Alps. The women wore dark peasant garb with grey aprons, working clothes, and one might think of pioneers in the Americas. Rather over-dressed, as one was forced to be by modesty. How many Dutch women got hooked on the sails of windmills as their skirts billowed about? Odd lace caps. And the men and their womenfolk all wore whitewashed clogs. Great big heavy clogs. Lethal weapons. The English might fling Wellies, and they’d be no match for these clogs.

The visiting De Speelluden dancers were all getting on in years, at least one long white beard worthy of Rip Van Winkle. I was near the stage as they went on and they spoke in Dutch, and the one member of the group who read from an English script did so with a thick accent. The dances were all rather alike, perhaps 8 or 10 women spinning around with 8 or 10 men. There was a dance about a girl who fell in love, at first sight, with a boy who lived in a windmill. Nowadays she would fall for the son of an industrialist who was blotting the countryside with wind turbines. There was also a dance about sunflowers, celebrating autumn. Perhaps Vincent van Gogh saw his sunflowers as autumnal things, rather than window dressing. Van Gogh’s work is so often of a seasonal nature.

The lady, reading slowly from her papers, said they would dance “The Waltz of the French Beasts” for us. It tells the story of the terrible “tummy pains” caused by those “French Beasts”. This certainly made me sit up. Those bloody awful Frenchmen invading Holland, raping the women (getting them knocked up) and stabbing the Dutch men in their guts. The dance was a bit of a spin around the stage, the accordionists playing, it must be said, in ¾ time. There was no doubling over at the waist in apparent anguish, and I thought we might be getting the children’s version with so many youngsters in the crowd. I was disappointed. When the spinning stopped, the lady read a little more from the script and suddenly I realised that I had misheard. This was “The Waltz of the French Beans” and the abdominal aches would have been from gas and not from pointy weaponry.

Three pairs of men did a dance that seemed to be showing what Dutchmen do when the pubs get out and they are quarrelling over one of the pretty girls. They thump one another with their chests and shoulders and stick their thumbs in their ears and waggle their fingers at each other. Brilliant! If Michael Jackson had done this in his act he’d have really been acclaimed for his dancing.



The ladies showed us their covered backsides, and I have no idea why. They then showed us their knickers. Nothing that floated my boat, but enough cloth to make sails with. And the ladies pulled open flaps on the fronts of the men’s trousers to reveal the male equivalent. This must pass for entertainment in Westervoort.

Holland is not all that far from here. People go down and across to Amsterdam by overnight ferry. De Speelluden certainly seemed strange and exotic for something a few hours away by boat.

Should one go to see folk dancing in Alnwick? Why not? It’s a fun day out and (it’s raining today) something to take one’s mind off the usual English summer weather. Should one learn to folk dance? I dare say there’s an arts critic in Westervoort who would find a Morris Dancing group from Yorkshire totally baffling, quite silly with the sticks and bells, and lacking any references to wind (windmills or French beans). I should probably stick with what I know. Shuffling in a crowded disco.

Blame it on the Boogie

I have seen a medicine

That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With spritely fire and motion.
William Shakespeare (All's Well that Ends Well. Act II, Scene I)

THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX is today, at exactly 15:43 GMT, and I suppose, if the rain were to ease up, I should head for the nearest stone circle, barrow or oak tree and do a dance. As it is British Summer Time, I must remember it would be about quarter to five that I should get jigging. The folks in Salt Lake City, many wearing funny knickers, should step outside their car dealerships at quarter to ten this morning, their time. If you are in Honolulu, in a grass skirt, knackered from entertaining tourists from the Mainland all night, a quick run around a palm tree at sunrise will suffice. If you happen to be in the Bourbon Street Pub in Key West, which will have opened 45 minutes ago, take off your t-shirts and give your best rendition of I Will Survive just before noon.

As the rain is pissing down in Northumberland, unusually, I am going to be reading this afternoon: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain or 2000 Years of Upper Class Twits in Charge by John O'Farrell. He's the author of a number of amusing studies, including Global Village Idiot and I Blame the Scapegoats. Put him on your reading list.

For a week or so, I have been reading the Impartial History, which began with Julius Caesar having a hell of a time getting four good seats together on the cross-channel ferry back in 55 BC when he invaded the British Isles. It is a big book, factual for all the humour. A critic says of it: As entertaining as a witch burning, and a lot more laughs.

At two o'clock this morning, I reached 1401 AD; Henry IV has just decided that it would not be a particularly bad thing to incinerate the Lollards in town squares as heretics. The Lollards, originally followers of John Wycliffe, who had translated the Bible into what passed as everyday English in 1382, believed that the average bloke might learn to be pious from the scriptures, not just from the priests. In other words, that piety might be developed at home, around the hearth with your family, in your vernacular, rather than struggled with at a church where someone mumbled Latin. Clearly, a revolutionary idea. Henry IV, as we all know from our Shakespeare, meaning it must be so, fell ill with insomnia, became insane, and his face was covered in ghastly pustules, which could happen to any of us. The clincher, however, was the poor, old-at-forty-five, King waking to find his son, the future Henry V, trying on the crown that he'd left on his spare pillow. Seems that torching the Lollards resulted in some bad Karma for the King. We should take note! If you must take your symbol of office to bed, then wear it, or someone will nick it. Uneasy lies the head that doesn't wear a crown.

It's riveting stuff for me. I studied English history generally, in Bermuda, but my high school course was centred on the first Hanoverian monarchs (Georges I, II and III) and, particularly, the American War of Independence, as we call it. O'Farrell suggests that the American Revolution might well have arisen from disputes over standards of British dentistry. I'm enjoying catching up on Boudicca, the Black Death, Stephen and Matilda, Piers Gaveston fondling the crown jewels and Edward II taking a red-hot poker up the bum, and so on.

What a history we have here! I'm sure that my ancestors must have known just a little of what was going on. A friend's cousin's brother-in-law took part in that Peasants' Revolt of 1381 when my great-grandad Eldridge was shovelling pig-shit for his master. I have never, for a moment, considered myself the heir to any sort of baronial title, much less a descendant of some mighty prince of the realm. I know one old queen in Bermuda who has linked himself back to the Plantagenet kings somehow. I'm never impressed when he tells the story. He's a twat, and a shame the Black Death missed his family's no doubt fabulous palace back in 1348.

Amble by the Sea, also known as The Friendliest Port, is historic in its own way. Amble has been ambling along for around 2,000 years, and there are lumps and bumps in the landscape, columns, walls and castles, coins in the fields, and ghost ships sunk in the Coquet Estuary, and the memories of the older folks who've managed to live here despite the winters, all testifying to things past.

Sometimes a bit of history comes to town. Last Saturday afternoon a troupe of Morris Dancers from Yorkshire (that's a northern English county well to the south of us) turned up in the Town Square. I had seen a little note about this in the window of the Bread Bin Bakery, a few doors down from my flat, and decided that if the sun was shining at one o'clock, I'd go and have a look. I've seen Morris Dancing on the telly, and in movies, it's quaint these days. I'm sure the young people think it's just naff. It does appeal to the tourists, I have no doubt, and I fancied some tourist-watching.

So far as I know, I've never seen Morris Dancers live. They were certainly naff when I was a student! I was too busy applying Clearasil to my face, combing my hair forward and wearing flowered shirts and ties from Carnaby Street to watch silly people in top hats, dressed in funny clothes, with bells strapped to their legs, and waving hankies about as they did in Nether Wallop before Noe's Floude.

I hitched Cailean up in his new multi-coloured harness and leash at quarter-to-one as, miracle, the sun was out on Saturday. It was not only sunny, but quite warm. We made our way down to the Square, with the usual stops to meet & greet and pick up the newspapers. At the Square the dancing had commenced. There were eight dancers, two alternates, a fellow playing some sort of squeeze box, and a girl who might have been ten or eleven who was clearly dealing with some developmental handicap. The girl was keeping watch over an upturned top hat with some coins in it placed on the cobbles at the entrance to the Square. The little girl, chubby, her bare bottom hanging out of her white, baggy sweat-pants, stared into some other dimension, her mouth wide open with amazement. I spent the late 1960s like that.

The dancers, all male, were dressed in white tunics and trousers with criss-crossed blue and maroon bands over their chests and backs, and grey top hats with matching blue and maroon ribbons, brown belts—some with mobile phones attached—did not match black shoes, bells were strapped below the dancers' knees. Most of the men were bearded, grey bearded. There was only one young chap, tall, fair-skinned, red-haired, dark glasses, too young to produce even a rudimentary whisker. Most of the group wore sunglasses, as I'm sure they did back in the Middle Ages. Tucked into the belts were white hankies, and there were duffle bags containing what turned out to be long sticks and short sticks off to one side of the designated dance-floor.

There were group dances from various villages in Yorkshire, which were not terribly unalike, one song in someone else's language, and then the leader of the pack said that young somebody—turned out to be the nice-looking lad with ginger hair—would do a solo turn. The group moved back, a tune was squeezed out enthusiastically, and the boy took to the air with his handkerchiefs. Look out, Billy Elliot, there's a new kid on the block. I'm not sure whether the dance was accurately performed, but it was well-done and rather entertaining (yes, like a witch burning) and I was most impressed that somebody of the next generation was going to take this peculiar custom forward. At least, I trust he will. The afternoon's show ended with some stick banging and the red-head did an odd run out of the line-up, swung around the metal sundial in the centre of the Square a few times, bobbed about a bit there—in theatre, this is called chewing the scenery, I believe—then ran and leapt back into the group with a flourish. Of course, we all applauded, scaring Cailean.

The audience, no more than twenty people and my dog, was, indeed, mostly made up of tourists. There had been one teenaged boy wearing a Newcastle United FC jersey, but once the jump-up began, he hurried off into a ginnel at the south side of the Square, no lover of history, pageantry or the arts. That or he preferred a wank.

I discussed the goings-on with a lady from Essex who'd been sat near me. Cailean had taken an interest in her and had climbed onto her lap when it was offered. The lady had suggested she mind him while I took some photographs. My accent, of course, baffles people. Are you Canadian? When you have the town's cutest dog, and an odd way of speaking, you can go a long way.

So, we wondered how regional accents have managed to survive, and whether they will do so in the future, and how long history can last in Britain. And we turned our faces to the sunshine, Cailean too, just like they did back before the Renaissance, and enjoyed the warmth of it all.