Something I’ve noticed about myself as I grow older is that I find I’m responding more emotionally to some things. Two specific examples in the past 24 hours brought this to mind. The first is Peter Ross’s A Tomb With A View. I’ve had this book for a while and have been dipping into it rather than binge-reading. Peter writes very well, and it’s a joy to savour some of his sentences (She spoke to gravediggers and the elderly, picking up stories like pebbles of quartz, following the light darkwards) but I found the chapter I read last night, Unmarked, from which that sentence comes, almost unbearably moving.

The second was rewatching Tim Plester’s The Way of the Morris, last mentioned here nine years ago. Plester’s film, about the Adderbury Morris Men in Oxfordshire, doesn’t so directly grab the heart strings and tear ducts as Ross’s book; the trigger is simultaneously abstract and visceral, evoking feelings about time and place, identity, family, memory and tradition. It also celebrates, and finds dignity in, the ridiculous, summoning thoughts of ravens and coyotes, dancing foxes and other tricksters, the weird and the vulgar, primal even, that underpin the quietly respectable. Morris was known in pre-Reformation Scotland, of course, but people forget that.

It’s a lovely film that I recommend almost unreservedly (my only hesitation is Billy Bragg talking some faux-Celtic nonsense about Samhain) but if you want to see The Way of the Morris you’ll need to buy a copy. Two trailers are online, though.

Long-term readers will recall I used to dance Rapper in Edinburgh, and a wee bit Long Sword in Biggar. That finished for me, for various reasons, when I changed jobs in early 2011. I miss it sometimes, even though I know my knees probably wouldn’t react well to it now. I haven’t written about it for a while and haven’t really reflected on it enough to write much now, but, at its best, it wasn’t just a good excuse to go and dance in pubs and have a good night. There was something else going on, something about the act of dancing itself as an expression of something else. I’ll come back to this when I’ve thought about it some more.

How happy’s that man
That’s free from all care
Who loves to make merry
Who loves to make merry
With a drop of good beer.

 

With his pipe & his friends
Puffing hours away
Singing song after song
Till he hails a new day.
He can laugh dance and sing
And smoke without fear
Be as happy as a king
Till he hails a new year.

(from the singing of Adderbury Morris)

And you can’t say fairer than that.

***

Music: The Princess Royal is a Morris Dance tune, associated with Cotswold Morris but also recorded several times by folk musicians. The tune may–or may not–have originated with Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan, there is debate. There is always debate. It also crops up in both major and minor key versions. Some dance it as a solo jig, others, notably Abingdon Morris, dance it as a side.

Anyway, here are two versions of the tune by Martin Simpson and Martin Carthy. The first is Martin Simpson in his trademark style with Carthy somewhat lower in the mix; the second, taken at Carthy’s pace, is more obviously a dance tune.